


The Apocrypha of Chuck

by maskedfangirl



Series: Chuck 'Verse [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Ace of Base sing-alongs, Alternate Canon, Bromance, Fallen!Castiel, Humor, M/M, Road Trips, Writer's Block, getting drunk with your fallen angel BFF, introducing fallen angels to fast food, maybe you shouldn't talk about duck penises at the dinner table, the prophet Chuck writes slash in secret
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-09-06
Updated: 2009-09-10
Packaged: 2017-10-24 22:43:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 22,996
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/268704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maskedfangirl/pseuds/maskedfangirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Chuck Shurley undertakes an unexpected road trip, introduces a fallen angel to WalMart and McDonald's shakes, and learns that if he wants a happy ending to his prophecies, he's gonna have to make it up it himself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Chuck Shurley had always had an overactive imagination. It forced him to slouch over his computer in his bathrobe for hours a day writing stories which, until this whole prophet revelation, he’d known would never be published. It set up elaborate fantasies about checkout girls at the grocery store - vast, sprawling ‘verses of material that started with longing looks over the Hot Pockets on the conveyer belt and ended with hand-holding on the porches of old folks’ homes. And when Chuck was upset, his imagination pounded the gas pedal and launched off, as far from reality as it could go.

So when Chuck’s vision spun into focus in his decimated living room, blood painting the walls and the angel Castiel spread-eagled on the upturned sofa with a softball-sized hole burned into his chest, it was only natural that Chuck thought of Lord of the Rings.

This was just like the battle of Helm’s Deep: the stronghold laid to waste by an army of too great a power, a should-be immortal being fallen in the chaos, and the heroes riding in to save the day when all hope seemed lost.

Right?

Chuck looked to the morning sun streaming in the hole in his kitchen ceiling. No last-minute heroes in sight, Riders of Rohan or otherwise.

Crap. Oh crap. Oh crap, oh crap, oh crap.

The battle between Castiel and the Archangel had flooded his home in angelic light, far too bright for Chuck’s mortal eyes to adjust to. He hadn’t seen much. But he had heard Castiel’s scream, and a tearing, hissing sound that made his spine shiver. Something in the very feel of the room had shifted, like a tremendous loss suddenly weighing on him. He still felt an echo of it now, lingering with the science classroom chemical smell after the fight, and he knew what it had to be.

The Archangel had torn Castiel’s grace right out of him. Killed him pretty dead, too, by the looks of it.

Chuck was frozen. His head rang like someone had pounded it on the inside of the Liberty Bell, and it was starting to ache. He wanted to ask aloud, “What do I do?” but the last time he asked that, Dickface told him to write. Chuck was pretty sure that writing wasn’t the proper response to a dead angel on the floor. He was also pretty sure that doing a “Replace All” in The Winchester Gospel to substitute “Dickface” for Zachariah’s name wasn’t the proper response to being told he was Heaven’s butt monkey, but hey, everybody copes differently with stress.

The dead angel groaned, and Chuck almost jumped clear through the hole in the roof. Dead things didn’t groan. And angels, come to think of it, didn’t groan either, and hey—dead angel rolling over onto his smashed end table. That couldn’t be helping things. Chuck offered Castiel a shaking hand up, and the angel grasped it far too weakly for a being of semi-phenomenal, nearly-cosmic power.

And now his imagination was putting Castiel in genie pants and giving him a blue spray-on tan, which was—really, that wasn’t anything that Chuck needed to picture, oh, say, ever. He swallowed the thought. “Hey, so, we’re alive,” he said, trying to sound upbeat. “Yay.”

“Dean,” the angel said with a cough. “Was he in time?”

Upbeatness over. “I—I don’t know. You guys’ve gone off the story. I don’t know where any of this is going, my outline’s trashed.”

Once he said it, Chuck realized that that particular idea scared him more than anything - more than blind Archangel vengeance, Lucifer rising, even more than trying to explain this mess to his insurance adjuster. He didn’t know what was going to happen. Much as he hated his lot in this screwed up morality play the angels had going, the certainty of his visions had been keeping him from going totally collecting-his-own-fingernails level crazy.

Crap.

Swaying but upright, Castiel let go of Chuck and both his hands felt at his chest. His button-down shirt was singed open in a nearly perfect circle and his tie severed just below the knot. It wasn’t a good look, office wear and battle damage. Deep damage, too - at least four inches of nothing driven into his chest, the flesh blackened all the way in. “There’s a hole in me,” Castiel said, frowning. He sounded—well, not angelic. Dazed, sort of.

“That’s—” For the hundredth time since the archangel’s light had begun to shake his kitchen floor, Chuck Shurley, God’s wordsmith on retainer, failed at words. “That’s…weird,” he said.

“Yes,” Castiel said blankly, staring at the gap.

Words. There had to be words. Maybe something comforting? “It’s, uh, kinda Tony Stark. But without the power supply.” Dammit, why did he even talk.

“Or the shrapnel,” Castiel added, still staring, his voice still flat.

Chuck stared, shocked momentarily that an angel had any knowledge of the Marvel universe - thinking, for just a split second, that maybe this particular angel was some sort of nerd-angel, and that they’d bond over their comic book nostalgia during a zany road trip sequence. Then he reeled in the leash on his runaway imagination and remembered what he knew about angels. Key angel factiod #1: they were professional voyeurs. When you had eternity to sit and watch humanity between fights, you picked up more than the average bear.

“So, that’s—that’s something,” Chuck said, scratching the back of his neck as he failed at not staring at the hole.

Castiel only squinted, testing a finger inside it - and hey, that was kind of gross. But not nearly as much so as Chuck had been expecting.

“You could, like, put things in it, I guess,” Chuck said, trying to find an upside.

“Sandwiches,” Castiel said, sounding definitely dazed now. “Biscuits. Pasta salad.” He gave Chuck the kind of very serious look usually reserved for imparting the Lord’s so-called plans and said, “Pack a picnic.”

Chuck wasn’t sure whether to laugh. He’d never known Castiel to make a joke. It was unnerving, to say the least - especially with that stare.

He’d also never known Castiel to tip to one side and faint across the arm of his couch, though, which was the next thing the guy did.

  
***

  
Chuck was making a mental list of things he’d never thought he’d do. It went like this:

1\. Be confronted by Supernatural characters in real life  
2\. Be asked to play the hero and save the day  
3\. Get drafted for Team God  
4\. Play taxi driver for a bloody unconscious angel  
5\. Bone Elizabeth Hurley

He took his attention off the stretch of deserted highway long enough to glance over his shoulder. Castiel was propped up awkwardly in the back seat, buckled in with one of those travel pillow things circled around his neck (Chuck had thought that was a nice touch). The entire Carver Edlund collection sat beside him in a post office crate, along with the hard drive from his slightly charred computer and a blank notebook in case of visions.

Chuck swallowed. Okay. So maybe, the way things were going, Elizabeth Hurley would be manning the next gas station - like, researching for a role as a slutty gas station attendant - and he’d get to cross that one last thing off his list.

Castiel made a small sound in his throat, and Chuck looked back again to see the angel coming around, blinking his eyes widely at the car’s interior as if it were some sort of unexpected trap.

“Morning,” Chuck said, because what else do you say to a recently fallen angel who passed out in your living room and still has a great big hole where his grace should be? And besides, it was morning, almost. Chuck’s watch had stopped when the Archangel arrived, and the station wagon’s clock display hadn’t worked since 1992, but by the dim orange rim on the eastern horizon, he guessed it was around five a.m. He’d been driving for awhile.

Castiel groaned slightly, slipping his shoulders back down against the seat. “Dean’s not here.” His voice had lost its agent of God power, and instead of sounding commanding, it merely seemed scratchy, like his vessel’s vocal cords were rubbing raw from speaking in such a low voice.

“Yeah,” Chuck said awkwardly, trying to sound consoling. “I—I know, buddy.”

“I sent him to be with Sam too late. He failed.”

Chuck knew that, too. He hadn’t predicted the angel’s disobedience, but he’d seen Sam and Dean quaking under the gaze of the newly risen Lucifer. He’d seen all of it weeks ago, spent four days straight scrawling it all down without sleep in the hopes that once it was out of him, it wouldn’t happen. But he knew better.

“What’s around my neck?” the angel asked, frowning at him in the rearview mirror.

“Travel pillow. It’s to, uh, support your head while you sleep.”

“Oh. Was I…asleep?”

“More like out cold,” Chuck answered, the eyes in the rearview boring into him like spotlights. Under their watch, he suddenly felt like he was being interrogated. “You fainted—which I guess you’re probably not used to, fainting not being high on the angelic behavior list, but, y’know, it’s not like it’s unmanly or anything, and—I mean, you’re not really a man anyway, more of a big screaming ball of holy light—or maybe not so much with the screaming and the holy anymore, since the Archangel—”

“Prophet?” Castiel said.

“Hm?” Chuck answered, hinging his jaw shut.

“Where are we going?”

“Oh.” Chuck cleared his throat, focusing on the road. “Bobby’s.”

“We’re going to see Robert Singer?”

“It’s where Sam and Dean go to regroup. I thought we might meet them there.” If they’re not dead, filled in a part of his brain he wanted to kick. Chuck forced a smile. “I’ve never been there, but I’ve written Sam and Dean driving there so many times I know all the landmarks. I think I could get there from just about anywhere in the country.”

“Useful,” Castiel muttered, and fabric rustled in the back seat. “You dressed my—my injury?”

“Sort of. They didn’t exactly cover gaping chest wounds in first aid training, so I just stuffed it with gauze and taped over it. Is that okay?”

“It seems sufficient.” A pause. “I’d like to take off the travel pillow now.”

  
***

  
For most of the ride, Castiel sat board-stiff in the back seat, staring at his reflection in the rearview and not saying anything. Before the angel had woken up, Chuck could at least dream up story plots or sing Joss Whedon musical numbers under his breath. With Castiel awake and staring, though, it was different. It was like silent judgement breathing down his neck. This was worse than that year he’d had a cat. The station wagon’s radio hadn’t worked since 1987, and the only cassette he had was Ace of Base - which he was fairly certain would earn him an even more intent stare, possibly with a head tilt included - so Chuck opted to go without music.

He stopped at a WalMart around the midway point and led Castiel into the store, sure to keep that trench coat firmly buttoned. The angel strode purposefully beside him while Chuck slouched along, hands stuffed in his jacket pockets, trying to imagine he wasn’t walking through the Men’s department with a fallen angel.

It was funny how drastically adding the phrase “a fallen angel” into sentences changed everything. Browsing the clearance section with a fallen angel. Picking out jeans and t-shirts for a fallen angel. Going to the men’s dressing rooms with a fallen angel. Listening outside the door as a fallen angel awkwardly learned to pull his limbs into clothing for the first time. Chuck could play the same game with “in the midst of the apocalypse” tagged onto the end of every sentence, but he’d decided early on that one of his goals for the day would be to limit his panic attacks to three or less, so he didn’t.

“What do you think?” he asked when Castiel pulled open the dressing room door.

The fallen angel furrowed his brow, handing the pile of de-hangered clothing gingerly over to him. His tie hung loose around his neck, but it had been seared in half anyway, so no big loss. “What do I think of what?”

“This,” Chuck said, nodding to the pile of clothing. “You need something that doesn’t have blood and burns on it. Come on, man, it’s my treat for you trying to save us from Lucifer. What do you want?”

The teenage boy at the dressing room check-in desk glanced over at them, frowning.

Castiel echoed the teenager’s expression. “What do I want?” he repeated, and the corners of his frown deepened. “Wanting is what got me into this,” he said, almost growling. “Wanting is what got my grace ripped from within me.”

“O-kay,” Chuck said, lowering his voice and raising a finger. “Right now, I’m just asking about the clothes.”

Castiel blew a breath out his nostrils, his hand crossing his chest absently. “The three on top fit.”

“Good.” Chuck nodded, sorting out the unwanted clothes and pushing them across the counter to the teenage employee. “That’s really good, Castiel. This here? Progress.”

The fallen angel kept a hand curled almost protectively over his chest the entire time they waited in the checkout line, only dropping it once they were back in the station wagon.

  
***

  
After a long stretch of silence, Castiel spoke out, scaring Chuck so badly he nearly veered off the road into a cow pen: “My stomach rumbles.”

Once Chuck regained control of the station wagon and his breathing (panic attack number two, he noted, keeping to his goal), he made a stop at the next McDonald’s. It wasn’t the best way to introduce an angel to food, he guessed, but it was better than letting him make sudden pronouncements about his digestive status for the rest of the trip, and besides, Chuck was hungry, too. He hadn’t realized it until he saw the garish yellow M rising along the interstate, but it had been nearly a day since he’d last eaten. Castiel had changed into a plain black t-shirt and jeans in the back seat in the WalMart parking lot, so walking inside this time, the two of them looked almost normal, if you squinted - except that Chuck probably looked like he hadn’t slept in eons and his stiff-backed pal wouldn’t drop the stare of non-blinking judgement. Chuck just hoped he wouldn’t direct it at the kids in the Play Land.

Rather than risk another rant on wanting, Chuck ordered for both of them. He sat in the plastic booth opposite Castiel, watching the former soldier of God disassemble his burger wrapper. The process was actually kind of fascinating - Castiel unwrapped his food so carefully it was like he might be saving the wrapper for a scrapbook or something.

Chuck briefly flashed to a mental scrapbook layout on floral patterned paper with the words “My First Road Trip” spelled out in calligraphy, a double cheeseburger wrapper folded into an origami crane in one corner, and a photo of the two of them waving peace signs in front of the Play Land ball pit.

Castiel ate quickly, at least. Once the burger met his lips, it was as if his body remembered what it was missing and leapt into action. The whole meal was gone in minutes, except for the chocolate shake - that Castiel savored. His eyes closed, his eyebrows bunched up, and all the hard lines on his face went slack as he sucked at the straw.

“Good stuff, right?” Chuck ventured.

“Mm,” his companion answered, gulping down shake. Then he stopped suddenly, his eyes flashing open, and drew both palms to his forehead. “Aaah!”

“Castiel?” Chuck said, leaning forward.

Castiel breathed raggedly, leaning back hard in his seat. “It—it hurts—”

Oh. “It’s just an ice cream headache, buddy. It’ll pass.”

“No, it—” Castiel took a deep breath, slowly slumping forward with his elbows on the table. One hand remained planted on his forehead, and from beneath it, he gave Chuck a look thick with meaning. “Chuck,” he said, quieter and slower, “it hurts.” His eyes were slick with sudden tears, and as he blinked them back, the realization dawned on Chuck.

The prophet leaned in closer over their trays. “You’ve never hurt before? I mean, the Archangel…with the tearing? That didn’t hurt?”

Castiel shook his head, his eyes trained on Chuck. “How do you cope with it?”

“Well, in this particular situation, you pinch the bridge of your nose and hiss about how it hurts, and then you drink more of your shake and repeat the process.” Chuck eyed his companion. Castiel’s hand was resting across his chest again, the fingers curled reflexively inward and his knuckles hard white. “How’s your, uh—” a large woman with a tray full of apple pies passed by, and Chuck searched for a euphemism for archangel-induced gaping chest wound “—arc reactor?”

Castiel assessed him for a moment before catching the reference and leaning back. He glanced down as if seeing his hand for the first time. “It is…” He pressed his lips in a thin line. “Not a physical pain.”

“Anything I can do to help?”

“It’s my punishment for the choice I made,” Castiel answered. “There is no ‘helping’ it.”

“Doesn’t seem fair,” Chuck muttered into a handful of fries.

“We’re facing the apocalypse. What about this world is fair?” Avoiding Chuck’s eyes, he took the straw into his mouth again and sipped. When the pain hit this time, the hand at his chest rose to the bridge of his nose and pinched carefully, as if testing out the gesture.

  
***

  
They stopped for the night at a motel off the interstate that couldn’t decide whether it was cowboy or fishing themed.

Chuck sat down at the table in the corner once Castiel was asleep, his notebook open in front of him. He stared at the page for a long time, willing something true to come to him - a flash of Sam and Dean wherever they might be, an update on the last seal, hell, he’d even take a vision of Dickface right now. Anything to prove he still had a grasp on the damn story.

Nothing came. His head hurt worse the harder he stared, but he was still sober, awake, and without a clue.

And it dawned on Chuck, with a sick weight in his stomach: he didn’t have it anymore. Maybe he was too close to the story now to see it properly; maybe everything had just careened too far off plot for visions to be relevant; maybe God had just realized that He was commissioning the most important religious text since the New Testament from a guy who ate spray cheese out of the can while watching Xena: Warrior Princess reruns. Whatever the reason, the story wasn’t in him anymore.

Chuck screwed up his face and pounded his fist against the notebook. The hard surface beneath it reverberated on impact, making him fling his hand back to his mouth to press his lips against the sore spot. Shaking out his hand, he realized he was still holding the pen.

And okay, maybe now still wasn’t the time to follow Dickface’s advice, but in the middle of the night, with a hole-punched fallen angel sleeping five feet away and the world being sucked into Hell, it was all Chuck could think to do. He put the pen to paper. Without the visions to guide him, he’d just be writing plain fiction, but hey, he could do that. So what if it wasn’t accurate? He could write a better story - a happier story. He could write events the way they ought to happen.

He started with the one thing he’d always wanted to write:

 _Realizing how much they needed one another, Sam and Dean hugged._

 _“I love you, Sammy,” Dean said gruffly into his brother’s collar._

 _“I love you, too, Dean,” Sam answered, squeezing his eyes shut so he didn’t cry._

 _In that eternal moment, they knew that no force in this plane or any other could break the bond of brotherhood between them._

Chuck stared at the scene for a moment, a weight settling into his stomach. He had so many weights digging into him today he almost didn’t notice the addition. Castiel was right: this world wasn’t fair. It was pointlessly cruel and lacked proper plot structure, and he was fairly certain there wouldn’t be a proper denouement at the end. Chuck reread the last few words. Unrealistic as they were, it felt good to write them. In this tangle of fallen grace and rising evil and supernatural Dickfaces, it felt like adding a little bit of light. Although…it seemed like something was missing.

 _And then they went out for pie,_ he wrote.

Nodding at the scene, he tucked his notebook away for the night.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Following a brief road trip sing-along, Chuck and Castiel arrive at Bobby's. The heroes ride in, bringing the weight of the world with them. Chuck's happy-verse gets a little sitcommy.

That morning at the motel, Chuck had given up on caring about Castiel giving him strange looks for his behavior. Maybe it the way the fallen angel’s months-old morning breath assaulted him first thing in the morning on their shared king-sized bed. Maybe it was the way his head pulsed with anxiety from the first moment his eyes opened, begging for a distraction. Maybe it was the fact that the world was ending anyway, so who the hell cared?

Whatever the reason, as Chuck pulled out of the motel parking lot, he popped Ace of Base’s 1995 synth-pop album The Bridge into the tape deck and cranked the volume up.

Three hours of repeated play later, he was beginning to think it was the best decision he’d made in weeks.

“Why, tell me, why is it oh so hard to find,” Castiel sang along from the passenger seat, his voice rasping slightly at the singer’s higher octave. “I pra-eeaaaay—each daaay—”

Both men tilted their heads, closed their eyes against the long stretch of interstate, and belted out passionately, “FOR A PERFECT WORLD, WHERE CHILDREN ARE LAUGHING, LOVERS ROMANCING, TIME STANDS STILL!”

“A PERFECT WORLD!” Chuck bellowed, his voice off-key.

“NOTHING TO CRY FOR, NO ONE TO DIE FOR,” Castiel crooned. “WON-DER-FUL—”

“A PERFECT WOOOORRLD,” they both finished.

“We really nailed that one,” Chuck said, slapping his hand against the wheel.

“I think I prefer ‘Angel Eyes,’” Castiel said instead of going on to the next verse.

“You would.”

“It’s romantic. And it doesn’t have random rapping in the middle.”

“No, it has fake bird noises instead. Have you got no taste? ‘Perfect World’ is the best song on this album!”

Castiel gazed at the tape deck, his lips tightening. “I’m sure Zachariah would agree. This is his message exactly - aside from the rapping.”

“It’s just a metaphor, Castiel. I’m pretty sure Ace of Base wasn’t actually involved in the heavenly host’s plans for apocalyptic world peace.” Castiel said nothing, which made Chuck’s skin crawl. “They—they weren’t, were they?”

“I was merely a foot soldier. I wouldn’t know.”

Chuck suddenly couldn’t shake the image of the Swedish pop group eating club sandwiches in Heaven’s green room. He gripped the wheel tighter, wondering if there was any part of his life that this whole apocalypse deal wasn’t going to sully. “Well, it doesn’t matter, anyway. We’ll be at Bobby’s in an hour or two, and then we’ll meet up with Sam and Dean and everything will be hunky dory again.”

“Unless Lucifer kills them first,” Castiel said grimly. “Or Lucifer finds Bobby first. Or the angels find us first.”

Chuck’s heart leapt into the back of his throat. “The—the angels are looking for us?”

Castiel gave him an obvious look. “I am a traitor. You are their most valued intelligence, who is keeping company with a traitor. What do you think?”

Chuck thought of what he’d seen of Dean’s Hell and of Castiel’s experience dragged back to Heaven, and he wondered which would be closer to the punishment for a prophet conspiring with the enemy. His chest seized up, his breath caught in his throat about in the spot where his heart was hanging out, and he pulled off to the side of the road, bracing his clammy hands on the steering wheel and struggling to grab control of his thoughts. He couldn’t believe how naive he’d been - of course the angels would hunt them! What else did angels do, if not hunt the good guys? Where were they? Did they know where he and Castiel were already? Were they just screwing with them? His body went cold, and control seemed like about the last thing he could ask for.

Castiel offered a careful hand at his shoulder after a little while, and the opening chords of “Angel Eyes” drifted in from the speakers.

That really didn’t help.

  
***

  
Chuck was totally weirding himself out by the time they neared Bobby’s. He’d recognized the diner with the large metal chicken on the roof a few miles out, and that wasn’t too bizarre, because hey, giant metal chicken? Kinda memorable. But Bobby’s house was in the middle of nowhere, sans landmarks, and in the last couple of miles, Chuck’s gut was guiding him one hundred percent. It wasn’t a matter of recognizing this cornfield or that stand of trees - it was a tug deep below his ribs that said this patch of road felt right. And he’d had writer’s intuition before, but this was just a little spooky. Especially when it brought the station wagon rambling up the long road to a ramshackle farm house in the midst of a scrap yard.

Chuck knew that house. He’d laid out graph paper floor plans of that house to get his bearings in scenes. Once, on a dare from his publisher, he’d written a piece of X-Files/Supernatural crossover smut that took place in its kitchen. He even knew all the spots where the porch boards creaked, and when he walked up to the front door with Castiel just behind him, he found his feet avoiding them instinctively. This setting was so familiar it may as well have been his own living room.

So it was all the more embarrassing when Bobby opened the door with a shotgun aimed at him and Chuck shrieked. Shrieked and flailed. He’d seen one of his pseudonym’s fangirls do that once, on a YouTube video. It had been upsetting then and was even more so now.

At least the reaction seemed to drop Bobby’s guard. “What in the hell?” he muttered. His eyes flicked to Castiel, assessing the wardrobe change, and he dropped the shotgun to his side with a sigh. “If it ain’t Ol’ Smitey. Come to claim my allegiance now, too?”

“I have no desire to convert you to the side of Heaven,” Castiel said earnestly. “We’re here seeking refuge.”

“We,” Bobby repeated, cocking an eyebrow at Chuck. “Who’s we?”

“Myself,” Castiel answered, “and this man.”

Chuck waved a hand, trying to look casual. “Nice to meet you. Chuck Shurely, prophet of the lord.”

Man, that would look great on business cards.

“Prophet?” Bobby scoffed, crossing his arms as he looked at the smaller man. “Yeah, Dean mentioned you. I don’t buy it.”

Chuck reached into his bank of previous visions and pulled out something only Bobby or a prophet watching Bobby would know. “After Dean died, you bookmarked a page on the Biggerson’s website because they had a shot of him winning the millionth customer prize. You hated the dumb look on his face, but you never got a photo of him yourself, so it had to suffice. ”

Bobby’s mouth dropped open slightly, and he swung his attention back to Castiel. “Last time I was talking to Dean, and he up and disappeared mid-sentence, that was your team, right?”

“My former ‘team,’ yes,” the fallen angel said, lowering his head. “I disobeyed in order to help Dean. He and Sam haven’t returned, have they?”

“No.” The old hunter’s jaw tightened, and he took a step back, nodding toward the house. “Come on inside, boys.”

Castiel strode into the house after Bobby, but Chuck hung back in the doorway, bracing his hands against the door frame. “You’re just gonna let us inside, no tricks, no nothing? You’re gonna trust us, just like that?”

Bobby frowned at him from under the shadow of his baseball hat. “Son, I trust him about as far as I can spit into the wind, and I find you a mite unsettling, but if he decides to use his eye-burning angel mojo on me, there isn’t really a thing I can do about it. Figure I may as well throw on an extra can of beans and play the proper host.”

“What about holy water in the beer?” Chuck suggested. “To, y’know, make sure we’re not demons?”

Bobby narrowed his eyes, and Chuck felt a pang of resentment toward whoever had assigned him his visions. He’d written that “Are ya stupid?” expression dozens of times. Until he’d been told it was real, he’d always been pleased to write the gesture, proud that he’d come up with a character so gruff and yet sympathetic. But of course, Bobby was just Bobby, and good characterization had nothing to do with it.

Chuck shrugged helplessly. “It’s been a long couple of days. I was really looking forward to a beer.”

“I’ll grab you one, but I ain’t wastin’ any holy water on you.” The hunger nodded behind them, and said as he headed into the kitchen, “In case you haven’t noticed, the world’s sorta ending.”

  
***

  
Chuck got all twitchy and anxious when people he knew read his books. Having one of his characters read them, though? That was a special kind of nervous.

Bobby’d been sitting at the kitchen table holding a PBR in one hand and a copy of Route 666 in the other for a couple hours now, a strange kind of smirk creeping up his face. He’d spotted the books when Chuck was lugging his one lonely box of possessions inside from the car and flipped open the one on top of the pile. Chuck had tried to distract himself with things like the apocalypse and tending to Castiel’s injury, but it was like watching a SyFy original movie - he wanted to look away and spare himself the pain, but he just couldn’t.

One of Bobby’s eyebrows disappeared under the brim of his torn hat. With a chuckle that was verging on a snort, he read aloud: “Dean’s world-weary hand caressed Cassie’s milky thigh in the morning sunlight. He wished he could stay wrapped up in her love forever, but the world needed heroes like him more than he needed to heal his wounded heart.”

Chuck frowned at the chest of the fallen angel who was seated on the couch in front of him, plucking an old wad of bandages from the hole where his grace had been. Castiel hadn’t said a thing since they’d come inside, just stared out the front window at the long driveway. He had barely looked up when Chuck asked him to unbutton his shirt, and now that the prophet was redressing his injury, he still kept his head craned sideways, toward that window.

“Your point being?” Chuck said, a little huffily.

“You tryin’ to give people diabetes, son? I thought this was supposed to be a horror novel.”

Chuck considered hurling the wad of gauze at Bobby. It was damp and smelled strongly of ozone and body odors. He imagined the old man would make a satisfyingly disgusted noise if it hit his cheek. But the old man had a rifle collection and a library full of nasty spells, so Chuck decided against it. Anyway, Castiel spoke up, making them both jump slightly.

“The Prophet Chuck’s word is the word of God.” He broke his staring contest with the window to swing his eyes to Bobby’s. “His work is divinely inspired. I would not question it if I were you.”

“Or what? You’ll make me take a nap?”

Castiel furrowed his brow. “You’re angry with me. That wasn’t my intention. I never meant you harm.”  
Chuck was impressed that the guy could remain so focused with a near-stranger packing fresh gauze into the cavity in his chest - especially a near-stranger whose medical expertise came almost exclusively from MASH reruns. He didn’t even flinch when Chuck adjusted the new line of medical tape, pulling away a few chest hairs.

“Well, you harmed,” Bobby responded, glaring. “And pretty majorly, too. Now Dean’s aligned with your feathery friends. I mean, if he’s even—” He made a face like he’d just drunk flat beer, muttered a husky “Shit,” and buried his nose in that book again.

Castiel’s head snapped sideways all of a sudden, his eyes wide at the window. It took Chuck a second to hear it, and then he let out a massive sigh, sitting back on the coffee table.

Here came the heroes, riding in to save the day! The low grumble of the Impala’s engine cut with Kansas’s Greatest Hits wasn’t exactly the sound of Rohirrim hoofbeats, and he was pretty sure the boys wouldn’t be wearing goofy but historically accurate tasseled helmets, but it was a heroic arrival nonetheless.

Bobby was the first one out to the porch. Chuck lagged behind, parking himself in the doorway to watch and feeling mightily out of place. He’d been hoping for this moment since he’d woken up to his bloody apartment, but now that it was here, he realized it wasn’t his moment to to enjoy. This was a time for the heroes to gather and lick their wounds.

“Lick their wounds.” How gross was that metaphor? He was pretty sure it was taken from lions or something, but didn’t lions have those sandpapery tongues meant to strip flesh away? Wouldn’t that just make the wounds hurt more? Chuck screwed up his mouth. He barely noticed Castiel hanging back in the doorway with him.

The Impala ambled to a stop in front of the house, making Chuck’s station wagon look like the hopelessly uncool nerd in the front yard car clique. Two dusty black doors creaked open, and in unison two tall men stepped out. Chuck’s heart did an awkward dance of glee at his protagonists being alive, and he crossed his arms, trying not to let it show. It was still weird thinking of them as real people who could do things he didn’t write.

Sam and Dean were slightly worse for wear, their clothes scuffed and bruises coloring patches of their exposed skin. Sam walked like he was wilting, his eyes to the ground and Dean trailing protectively close behind him. The boys’ feet clunked against the porch steps and stopped a few feet away.

Bobby lifted his PBR to his lips and took a swig. When the boys didn’t say anything, he looked to Dean and asked, “You apologize yet?”

“Yeah, Bobby,” Dean replied with a sigh. “About fifteen times.”

“And you?”

Sam shrugged uncomfortably. “Yeah, I did.”

“All right, then.” Bobby wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. “You’re family, and this is no time to forget that. Got it?”

“Yes, sir,” both boys answered, sounding equally ashamed. It warmed Chuck’s heart a little.

“Now.” The old man frowned at them, finally broaching the subject. “One of you idjits wanna tell me what happened out there?”

Dean opened his mouth and raised his shoulders, but Sam shot him a pleading look. “I’ll do it,” he said, his voice strained, and Chuck just about couldn’t stand his expression. It reminded him of a cocker spaniel he’d had as a kid. Sam stepped forward, slouching to Bobby’s eye level. “Look, Bobby, I—” he started apologetically, and then stopped as his eyes caught on the figures in the doorway.

“We’ve got guests,” Bobby said. Setting a hand on the boy’s shoulder, he said in a lower tone, “I know, son. You weren’t yourself. Come on, you can fill me in over a beer.”

They walked inside, brushing past Chuck and Castiel. Chuck was briefly annoyed that Sam got a beer first thing in the door even after knocking Bobby unconscious, but he was a sucker for that theme of familyhood they had going on, so he let it slide.

“Cas?” Dean said roughly. He’d only just spotted the fallen angel, and his expression said that was the last guest he’d expected in Bobby’s parlor.

“Dean,” Castiel said with a note of relief.

And then Dean crossed the space between them and wrapped his arms around Castiel’s shoulders, hugging him hard and giving Chuck a close-up view of his armpit. All these guys were way too tall. Chuck shrank back from the doorway, crossing his arms against his stomach. No familiar pat on the shoulder or hug for him, no beer except upon special request - no, this wasn’t his scene. He was just an interloper with a box full of outdated prophecies and an Ace of Base tape in his crappy old car. Realizing the disgust it would provoke, he resolved then and there to never, ever tell Dean about that tape.

Dean and Castiel were still hugging. It was…actually kind of weird. Well, hugging an angel was weird in any context, but the way Dean hung on and Castiel cautiously returned the gesture, his arms creeping up to close around the man’s back - that was a kind of man-hug Chuck had never witnessed before. Must be an “I thought you were dead” man-hug.

“God, Cas, I thought you were dead.”

Bingo! Did he know his characters or what?

“Not dead,” Castiel said as they parted, avoiding Dean’s eyes. “We were too late.” It wasn’t a question, and Dean didn’t bother answering it. The meaning of his silence passed through the room with a shiver.

“Wait a minute.” Dean stepped back. “Something’s different about you.” His lips parted slightly as he spotted the bandage reaching across the span between the sides of Castiel’s open shirt, and the angel looked away, his jaw clamped shut. “What happened with the archangel, Cas? What did they do to you?”

In his visions, Chuck had seen the angel in his most private moments of doubt, but until this moment, he had never seen his chin shake. Now it was the only part of his face that moved, his eyes locked on the battered couch.

“Cas?” Dean repeated, louder.

“His grace,” Chuck chimed in, because he was sure the angel wouldn’t. “They ripped his grace out. Left a hole in its place - and not the clean literary metaphor kind. The gross kind. I dressed it. There was puss.”

Dean looked at him like he’d just noticed his existence - and with the way he was struggling to play eye tag with Castiel, maybe he had. “What?” he said.

“Puss,” Chuck repeated. “I mean, not much of it, but enough to kind of squick me out when I—”

“Prophet?” Castiel said.

He was really starting to hate being called that. It felt like a lie. “Hm?”

“Leave it.”

“They took your grace?” Dean said, cocking his head. “Just revoked it, like a gym membership?”

“There was considerably more gouging than a gym membership,” Castiel corrected him, still not looking up. “It doesn’t matter. I knew they might do it when I disobeyed.”

“So this is just—what? Something in the fine print of the angel contract?”

“There are more important matters—”

“And you’re just gonna give them a pass on this one because we’re a little busy?”

“No,” Castiel said firmly, his eyes finally rising to meet Dean’s. “I’m going to give them ‘a pass on this one’ because this is the punishment I earned, and I’m lucky they didn’t take more.”

“No freaking way,” Dean said, tossing his hands up over the back of his head. “We can’t just let them get away with this. I mean, the whole ‘Went to Bible camp, came back weird’ thing was bad enough, but ripping the middle out of a guy? Taking away what makes him himself? That’s cruel and unusual jackassery, and we oughtta have a zero tolerance policy on that kind of crap.”

Secretly, Chuck enjoyed the thematic potential of this conversation - the literary symmetry of Dean’s loss of self in Hell and Castiel’s loss of self on earth. Both men had had their figurative - and probably, knowing Dean’s history in Hell, literal - insides hollowed out with blunt instruments after a fall to the next lowest plane. It was poignant, possibly heartbreaking. The stuff of critical raves.

God, this was what he was using his BA in English for: overanalyzing his companions’ conversations. Chuck folded his arms and settled into a threadbare armchair, trying to analyze the fading wallpaper instead.

“What would you do?” Castiel was asking, his voice slightly raised. “What great punishment would your wreak on the host of Heaven, Dean?”

“Well, I’d sure as hell do more than stand around here with my junk in my hands!”

Castiel frowned, studying him with a look of mild distaste, and it occurred to Chuck that the guy probably didn’t know the non-literal meaning of the phrase. He muffled a laugh in his hand, and both of his companions turned to look at him.

Then Bobby’s voice rose from the exposition session in the kitchen, scolding, “Dammit, Sam!” and once more, Chuck was forgotten in the shadow of the too-tall apocalyptic heroes.

  
***

  
 _“It’ll all be fine,” Bobby said, wiping his brow beneath his hat. “I didn’t mean to panic all of you with that crap about Heaven and Hell raining down war on the earth. I saw on the news everything got cleared up by the Avengers, so the only thing we’ve got to worry about is global warming, and maybe running out of beer.”_

 _“I’ll handle global warming,” Sam said determinedly. “I just need an internet connection, a six-pack of Red Bull, and Al Gore’s home number.”_

 _“Leave the beer to me,” Dean volunteered. “It would be an honor.”_

 _“Gosh, I’m just so dang proud of you boys.”_

 _Dean shook his head, manly tears welling in his eyes. “You’re like a father to me, Bobby.”_

 _“Me too,” Sam said soulfully._

 _“I’d like for you to be like a father to me as well,” Castiel offered, “but I’m only just learning to make human connections, and I think that’s beyond my level.”_

 _“That’s okay, Cas,” Dean said, pulling the fallen angel into a one-armed hug. “I’ll teach you everything you need to know about being human. Have you had a chance to try skin mags yet?” The angel shook his head, and Dean clapped his shoulder. “Dude, I have a lesson plan all laid out for you.”_

 _“Gross,” Sam said._

Okay, so he was getting a little punchy and melodramatic. But so what? No one was going to read this.

Chuck leaned back in his chair, letting his eyes trail up the sloped iron walls of the panic room.  
It was a decent writing setup: a small desk right next to his cot, far enough from the other cot that he wouldn’t feel Castiel’s gaze over his shoulder if he sat down to write at night. He hadn’t wanted to share the panic room as a guest bedroom with Castiel, but the gang had had insisted their resident prophet have additional protection from demons, and it wasn’t like the Winchesters were going to share it. Hell, when Sam had tried to help them move the furniture into it, he’d started shaking so badly in the threshold that he had to sit out. Dean, to his credit, had tried to lighten the mood by making “Sam’s a girl” jokes.

“Sam’s a girl” jokes had always been Chuck’s favorite jokes to write, second only to “Sam and Dean are gay” jokes. “Sam and Dean are gay” jokes were just classic.

Muffled voices and footsteps circled the first floor overhead as the heroes discussed their options. Chuck didn’t really see any options, but then, without his visions, he couldn’t really see anything beyond the next twenty minutes.

For the next twenty minutes, while the heroes held congress upstairs, Chuck planned on continuing the writing project he’d started the night before. It was a happy little universe, he’d decided - based on this one, but with no mention of Lucifer. In his happy-verse, every major problem would solve itself sitcom-style, in thirty minutes or less, possibly with a lame joke and a chorus of laughter in the final seconds.

Chuck’s first instinct was to include himself in the story, as the prophet the good guys, bad guys, and bad good guys were fighting over. It would give the story a backbone - conflict being plot and all. But the idea of writing himself as that important a character made him squirm. He wasn’t important. He wasn’t the kind of guy who could carry the weight of a plot. A catalyst character like that needed heroic qualities - guts, personal agency, probably a life. A catalyst character should be noble on some level. Chuck was—well, he was himself. His favorite set of clothes included Simpsons boxers and a bathrobe. For chrissakes, on the eve of Lucifer rising, rather than warning the heroic types or leaping into the fray himself, he’d been ordering hookers. So, after having a quiet conversation with himself at the writing desk, Chuck decided to drop the whole Prophet-Angel-Bait-Chuck plotline.

What he would replace it with, he didn’t know. After being psychically handed his writing material on this series for so long, he was having a hard time coming up with plots.

It’d come eventually, he decided. He hadn’t lost his writing mojo along with his prophet mojo - or at least, he didn’t think so. The three scenes he’d written in the last couple of hours seemed okay.

Upstairs, someone stomped and Bobby called one of the boys (or maybe Castiel) a moron.

In the happy-verse, Bobby was taking Sam and Dean out for pie and ice cream. Castiel was invited along in the end, due to Dean’s insistence.

 _“But how do I eat it?” he said, staring mournfully at his pie as he prodded it with the wrong end of a spoon._

 _“Oh, Cas!” Dean said. “Your wacky fallen angel antics!”_

Laugh track. Roll credits.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> References:
> 
> [Ace of Base - A Perfect World](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lG9p9QTTMo)
> 
> [Ace of Base - Angel Eyes (Sailor Moon fanvid)](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CT1g2kI8b2o) (Warning: may induce nausea, inter-cranial hemorrhaging, and inability to sympathize with Castiel's music preferences*)  
> *may have been my favorite song on the album when I was twelve, so I can vouch for the symptoms.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chuck avoids the Big Issues by playing with his food, writing his happy-verse, and getting an angel sloshed. The happy-verse takes an unexpected turn.

Everyone stared at Chuck over dinner, and it wasn’t because he was building a tiny castle in his mashed potatoes. If anything, the mashed potato castle was a product of the staring. Chuck didn’t cope well with that kind of focused attention. It was why he never accepted invitations to appear at conventions. Sam had brought up the Winchester Gospel while setting the table, and since then it had apparently been time for The Chuck Shurley Show. He walked his green bean king and lima bean queen across the salisbury steak drawbridge and smooshed them into the throne chamber, hoping that when he looked up there would no longer be eyes on him.

No such luck. Not only was everyone still staring at him like he was ticking, but Bobby was downright scowling and Castiel was studying the parade of bean people as if there were some sort of code written in their procession.

It was Sam who broke the silence. “Um, Chuck?”

“What?” Chuck snapped, harsher than he’d intended.

Sam’s enormous brow ridge flattened, and he cleared his throat. “Had any visions recently?”

“Not recently,” Chuck said, shrugging. His efforts to line up his bean knights were failing, since they kept falling into the gravy moat.

“Are you sure?”

Chuck gave him a weary look across the table. “Yes, Sam, I’m sure I haven’t been having any visions.”

“Sure you didn’t just miss one?” Dean chimed in, giving him a suspicious look.

“‘Miss one’? I’m not some kind of unreliable voicemail service!” Chuck felt his voice rising hard in his throat, and he tried to push it down a little. “It’s just—I mean—” He glanced around the table, and the words got caught. He wasn’t a prophet anymore. He wasn’t tuned into God Radio. He was a useless civilian wasting Bobby Singer’s mashed potatoes. Everyone here thought he was some kind of secret weapon, and if they knew that keeping him around was pointless, he didn’t know what they’d do. All of them had surprised him so much in this whole mess he didn’t know what to expect from them anymore. Sam had walked out on his brother. Dean had aligned himself with Heaven. Castiel had fallen. And Bobby—well, Bobby was still pretty much predictable, but the way he was glaring at Chuck’s mashed potato castle, Chuck wasn’t sure the guy would object to using him as a bargaining chip with Lucifer or whoever, given the chance.

“I just—” he started again. “I’m just not getting any calls lately. Nothing important, anyway.” That was cryptic enough it shouldn’t give him away.

Everyone leaned back in their seats.

“Okay,” Dean said, “so we’re running without any kind of plan here.”

“Until God starts talking to Chuck again, anyway,” Sam said.

“We can’t just wait around for that to happen,” Bobby said. “We’re probably on Lucifer’s radar, and Heaven’s, too. I mean, couldja pick a more obvious place to hide out, boys?”

The way Sam and Dean looked at each other, Chuck knew they hadn’t thought it through. This wasn’t a smart thing. It wasn’t even a “Bobby will know what to do” thing. It was an instinct thing. Whenever they were lost in one way or another, they came to Bobby. Bobby was family. Bobby was comfort.

Bobby was glaring at Chuck like he’d mulched his favorite baseball hat. “You gonna eat that, son?”

Chuck wolfed down a mouthful of turret lest he anger his host further.

“We could load up on hex bags,” Sam suggested.

“These are high level sons of bitches we’re messing with,” Dean said. “Big league angels all around. No guarantee hex bags’ll do the trick. What we really need is some extra strength Angel-B-Gone.”

“Blood sigils,” Castiel said, catching his eye. “They may still work even though I no longer have my grace.”

“That’s right, it worked for Anna when she was still human,” Chuck said through a mouthful of mashed potatoes. Dean shot him a “How do you know that?” look, and Chuck pointed his fork at his face. “Prophetic visions.” He swallowed. “I saw everything.”

“Well, now that I’m all uncomfortable…” Dean said, drawing his shoulders up to his ears, and it took Chuck a moment to remember there had been car sex in that particular line of plot events.

“But isn’t that short-term mojo?” Sam said.

“Yes.” Castiel gave his half-empty plate a disappointed look. “It banishes angels from the space, but the effects only last until the blood dries.”

“And we can’t go draining you every couple hours to keep your finger paintings wet,” Dean said. “That has this nasty tendency to kill people.”

Castiel’s eyes widened at his half-eaten salisbury steak, and he paled. Chuck wondered if he was just now realizing his mortality.

“What about Anna?” Sam said. “She’s immortal now. If we could summon her, maybe she would—”

“You can’t,” Castiel interrupted, his voice higher than normal.

“Why not?” Dean said.

“Because she is—” His mouth remained open, but he couldn’t seem to get the words out.

“She’s…with the angels now,” Chuck finished. It was what he’d been told when his pet turtle died in third grade, and it seemed disturbingly accurate now.

The hunters exchanged solemn looks.

“Drain me,” Castiel said quietly.

“No,” Dean said immediately.

“I should have been destroyed when I disobeyed, Dean - this mortal life is a gift of mercy, and I could do no better than giving it for a just cause.”

“How long would that give us?” Bobby asked.

“No!” Dean repeated.

“Maybe a week or two, if we kept the sigils small,” Sam answered.

“That’s more time than we got now,” Bobby said.

“Goddammit, I said NO!” Dean pounded his fist on the table so hard it made Chuck’s one remaining turret plop into the gravy moat. “Nobody’s sacrificing anybody! Haven’t you guys been paying attention? We’ve got three things that separate us from them - three measly things! We don’t kill innocents, and we don’t buy into this ‘greater good’ bullcrap over our consciences - what part of that involves sacrificing a freshly minted human to cover our asses for a little while?”

“None of it, but—” Bobby frowned. “Wait, what’s the third thing?”

Dean smirked. “We’re not a bunch of repressed, bitter virgins.”

Castiel started to open his mouth, then shrugged and nodded. Chuck smiled a little. They did have that.

Sam suddenly sat bolt upright and declared, “Linseed oil.”

“Random noun to you too, Sammy. The hell?”

“It’s a binder in oil paint,” Sam said, gesturing so widely he made Chuck a little nervous, even from across the table. “In ancient oil paints, they used to use egg yolk as a binder, to hold the pigments in place and keep the paint wet long enough to be workable. But it had a tendency to rot and change colors when dry, so they started using linseed oil as a binder instead.” At a raised eyebrow from Bobby, he explained, “Linseed oil takes days, sometimes weeks to dry. Mix it with Castiel’s blood and we’ve got ourselves a loophole.”

“And Encyclopedia Boy’s back in the game!” Dean grinned, clapping him on the shoulder.

“We’ve just gotta get some linseed oil,” Sam said, looking slightly less excited. “How far’s the nearest art supply store?”

“Dunno,” Bobby said. “Few hours?”

Staring at Bobby’s impassive face, Chuck felt the words burst out of him before he could filter the stupid out: “Your wife!” Everyone was staring at him again, this time with mingled looks of disgust and horror. Bobby had that “you mulched my hat” face on again. “I mean,” Chuck started again, “you’ve still got her painting supplies in the attic, right?”

“Your wife was an artist?” Sam said, sounding genuinely interested in the revelation.

“Who do you think did all the landscape paintings around here?” Chuck said, feeling a little proud of himself. Then he spotted Bobby glaring at him and deflated slightly. “I—I saw you going through her things on your last anniversary. I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry. Could you, uh…please stop staring at me like that?”

Bobby did not stop. Bobby looked sort of determined to make it his life’s goal to make Chuck as uncomfortable as possible. Chuck didn’t really blame him. He knew how private Bobby was, and in the handful of hours since they’d met, he’d already blurted out two of his closest-held secrets.

“Bobby?” Sam said. “Linseed oil?”

“Right,” Bobby said, his eyes still on Chuck. “Attic’s through the back of the bedroom closet. Check the pine trunk.”

Sam and Dean excused themselves to go look, leaving Bobby to his staring.

Locking his attention on his plate, Chuck searched for something that might lighten the mood. He could recite a Monty Python scene, but he didn’t think Bobby would be amused. Poking two forks into lima beans and making them dance like little tap shoes probably wouldn’t work either, and he was willing to bet Bobby wouldn’t be interested in the latest Lost gossip. So he opted to freeze like a cornered animal instead.

“Bobby,” Castiel offered, “I’m sorry for your loss.”

Bobby’s chair squeaked back, and he grabbed his plate and glass. “Why don’t you two do yourselves a favor?” he said, heading to the sink. “Shut up.”

  
***

  
Chuck watched from the kitchen doorway as Operation Angel Blood went down. Sam, being pretty well schooled in the places you could bleed a person without killing them, was the one to draw the knife down across Castiel’s arm. The fallen angel stared at his blood collecting in the Big Gulp cup, his brows slightly lowered and his gaze its old intense beam.

Dean took it upon himself to bandage Castiel up after they’d collected the required amount. Chuck had always known the guy had a good bedside manner, but seeing it in person was something else - this giant, hard-edged demon hunter crouching by the couch, talking softly and offering a consoling hand when the medical tape pinched the cut. Hell, he even had orange juice and a cookie ready when Castiel was all bandaged up.

“I can do that part for ya,” Bobby offered, reaching a hand toward the Big Gulp cup as Sam unscrewed the cap on the bulk sized bottle of linseed oil.

“It’s okay, Bobby, I got it.”

“You sure?”

Sam frowned into the bottle, and Chuck could just about hear the battle between guilt and self-defense churning in his head.

“Bobby,” Dean said, helping Cas sit up, “he’s not gonna drink the art project. Let him do his thing.”

Chuck was glad he didn’t have to write this scene. Writing tension between the Winchesters - especially when Bobby was involved, too - made him nauseous. He’d made best friends with his toilet while he was writing Lucifer Rising. Hell, this was making him a little nauseous even as an observer.

Especially when Sam handed the cup over to Bobby and made a silent retreat out to the porch, his head bowed to the floor to hide his brooding, guilt-wracked expression.

Chuck stuck around long enough to watch Castiel start painting the sigil on the wall, but then he made a hasty exit, too, burying his attention in his writing notebook in the panic room.

 _Sam sat out on the porch for a long while, staring at the passing strips of clouds on the horizon, the weight of what he'd done pressing down on him like the very hand of God. His insides bunched up as if trying to eject the memories. He drew a hand down his face, exhausted at the effort of pretending everything was okay._

 _“Hey,” said a familiar voice from the doorway - the voice that had brought him through every other hard patch in his life. He glanced up. Dean walked over, handing him a beer from the two cold bottles held between his fingers. “Thought you could use some company.”_

 _“Sure I wouldn’t rather have a bottle of demon blood?” Sam retorted bitterly._

 _“Take the beer, you freak,” Dean said, smiling. Sam did. Dean sat down beside him and clinked their glasses together. “To our triumphant return to normalcy - whatever the hell that is.”_

 _Sam chuckled. “Yeah.”_

 _“Hey, Sammy.”_

 _“Yeah?”_

 _“It was the end of the world. We all did some stupid crap, but we’re past it now. You’re okay.”_

 _And for the first time since Dean had gone to Hell, Sam felt like maybe that was true._

  
***

  
Sam’s plan was a good one - the sigil stayed wet. Sam made it his personal mission to keep an eye on it, waking himself up midway through the night to check on it and keeping the spare “paint” mix sealed tightly in a container in the fridge to be stirred every few hours. He was determined. This was his global warming.

Bobby went on playing the gruff host, picking up the role of angel lore researcher as well once it became clear they wouldn’t need to drain Castiel dry anytime soon.

Dean seemed to take it upon himself to become Castiel’s personal chaperone. Over the course of the first few days in the house, he kept so close to the fallen angel that it reminded Chuck of—what was the name of that awful comedy with the conjoined twins? Stuck On You, that was it. He’d watched it while baked at a friend’s house once and woke up the next morning in a haze of regret. He wondered how much it cost to get clothes custom-made for conjoined twins. Did Bobby have a sewing machine?

Anyway, Dean/Matt Damon was stuck on Castiel/Greg Kinnear, teaching him human things like firing a gun and making scrambled eggs with cheese. He assisted Castiel when Castiel wanted to assist Bobby with research. He even took responsibility over Castiel’s injuries, redressing the bandage on his chest daily so Chuck didn’t have to. The only person who could pull Dean away from his angel watching duties was Sam, but Sam was so busy watching paint dry that he didn’t do it often.

So Chuck was left without anything to do but write. Every so often someone made a subtle “Seen anything interesting lately?” noise at him, but he never had a satisfying reply, so in a rather short time, they stopped paying much attention to him. He almost missed the stares over the dinner table - then at least he’d felt like maybe someone wanted him here.

Chuck tried to lose himself in his happy-verse. It was difficult, with no plot to move the action along. He wrote about pie fights. And Bobby and Castiel bonding over research. And arguments over who got the bathroom first thing in the morning - those were culled from real life. And Sam teaching Castiel to play horseshoes in the yard.

And, because he figured his Castiel needed some healing as much as his fictional hunters, he wrote Castiel being doted on by Dean.

 _“There’s nothing to it,” Dean said, carefully laying down the edge of the bandage on the fallen angel’s chest. The place where his grace had been ripped out was healing nicely, new skin already pressing up from within the hole. It was impressive, really - Dean was tempted to call it a miracle. “It’s all conditioning. Your foot learns the pedals and your hands learn the wheel. The real trick is dealing with other drivers.”_

 _“You would let me drive the Impala?”_

 _“Of course, man. You fell trying to help me. I owe you way more than that.”_

 _Castiel shot him a challenging look. “Would you let me drive slow on the interstate?”_

 _Dean frowned but nodded anyway. “Whatever you want.”_

 _“And I could tune your radio to the soft rock station with the rain sounds in the advertisements?”_

 _Dean’s jaw clenched. “Sure.”_

 _“Dean,” Castiel said, giving him a wry look, “I may have lost my grace for you, but that doesn’t mean you have to make sacrifices for my sake.” He smiled a little, a ray of sunlight in the evening dusk. “I won’t drive your car.”_

 _“Oh, thank God,” Dean said, the air rushing out of him._

 _Castiel chuckled slightly, then his expression went pensive. “Dean…” he started._

 _“Yeah?”_

 _The fallen angel stared at the scuffed kitchen tiles and shook his head. “Nothing.”_

Ah, the enigmatic “Nothing,” tension-building tool of writers everywhere. Chuck would find something to fill it with eventually. He just had to get into the angel’s head. And for that, he had an idea.

  
***

  
Chuck closed the panic room door quietly behind him, using his foot to muffle the sound. On the cot across the room, Castiel raised his head. Chuck pressed a finger to his lips, the liquor bottles in his hand clinking together. Not that he was really worried - the only other person awake in the house was Sam, who was repainting the parts of the sigil that had gone tacky, and Sam wouldn’t venture in here.

“Where did you get those?” Castiel said, sitting up. He was drowning in a set of Bobby’s spare pajama pants and one of Dean’s old Zeppelin t-shirts. Both of them were drowning in borrowed clothes these days - Chuck hadn’t thought to bring more than one spare set, and Sam had generously lent him a box of clothes from his teenage years, which had been stashed in the crawl space over Bobby’s garage. Chuck had been pleased to find a He-Man t-shirt among the cast-offs, but there was no bonding over shared retro cartoon interests - Sam didn’t even remember owning it.

“Tank of the old toilet in the storage room,” Chuck answered, pulling a chair over to Castiel’s cot so he could set the bottles down. “This house is a regular Where’s Waldo book of hidden liquor, and I’ve got the mental cheat sheet.”

“The level of detail in your visions is extraordinary,” Castiel said, looking at him almost fondly. “Most prophets write in metaphor and generality. You really are a wonder of God’s work.”

Chuck swallowed, wanting to correct him. Unscrewing the cap on the first bottle, he asked instead, “Whiskey or jug wine for you, Mr. Stark?”

His companion smiled at the reference and licked his lips slightly, reading the text on the bottles. “I don’t know. I’ve hardly drunk in my existence.”

“What have you had that you liked?”

“I once had wine to celebrate a bris milah.”

“Oh, yeah? Whose?”

“The Christ child.”

Chuck’s hands paused. Castiel looked across the cot at him earnestly, a being older than the Bible wearing Bobby Singer’s stripy pajama pants. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s try the jug wine.”

If Chuck had known that Castiel was a giggly drunk, he would’ve tried to get him drunk a lot sooner. Half an hour after starting on their respective bottles, they were sitting on the cot together, cross-legged, Castiel leaning way too far into Chuck’s personal bubble and trying to staunch the shrill noises coming out of himself.

“Why do—” he said between burps of giggles “—why do human bodies do this? It’s—” another round “—absurd! It’s absurd! I sound like birds!”

“Angel eyes, with your angel eyes,” Chuck sang softly, taking a swig of whiskey. The liquid burned his throat, and he coughed out, “Will you always be the-ere to hold me? Ooh, oo-oh.”

Castiel burst into another fit of giggles, holding his stomach and nearly falling off the cot. Then, composing himself, he shot Chuck a menacing look. “Do not mock my music tastes.”

Chuck snorted, and a moment later the fallen angel’s lips twitched upward and he laughed, too. “You’re funny, you know that?”

“I had been studying humor, trying to make up for the void that Uriel left.” Castiel shook his head, giving the door of the panic room a sad look. “Now all my garrison has is Zachariah, and he only thinks he’s funny.”

“Dickface,” Chuck corrected sternly. “C’mon, buddy, if you’re gonna drink with me, you gotta use the proper terminology.”

“Dickface is a tool,” Castiel agreed solemnly.

And then they were both lost to giggles for a good five minutes.

After forty-five minutes of drinking, it was apparently time to quote Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

“And then she’s like ‘You had sex with Giles? On the hood of a police car? TWICE?’”

“I always appreciated Giles. His righteous wrath reminded me of Nuriel - he rains down hail, you know.”

“Yeah?”

“Wouldn’t have sex with him on the hood of a police car, though. Him or Nuriel.”

After an hour of drinking, it was time for brains to splash around in the gutter.

“And I mean, the whole deal - all of these emotions churning inside me. It’s just so hard to keep it up.”

“That’s what she said!”

“Uncalled for, Mr. Stark. Uncalled for.”

And then after an hour and a half of drinking, when Chuck’s ability to sit upright without the room spinning was in question, it was finally time for drunk confessions.

Chuck leaned against the panic room wall, bolts digging slightly into the back of his head. “If you’re Tony Stark, does that make me Pepper Potts?”

“Do you want to be Pepper Potts?” Castiel asked. He’d stretched himself out width-wise across the cot, his feet hanging off the edge and his head shoved against a pillow at the wall.

“Not really.”

“Then you could be Rhodey.” Castiel punched him lightly in the arm, and the wine bottle in that hand sloshed. “You have my back.”

“I have your back,” Chuck agreed. “I do. And y’know why? It’s ‘cause I think you’re the only one in this whole place that actually likes me. Everybody else, pfft.” He waved a hand. “They only keep me around ‘cause they think I’m some key to winning a holy war.”

“Dean told me he likes you. He just thinks you’re, uh…what was it? ‘Creepier’n a bag full of gremlins,’ but he likes you.”

“Man, Gremlins scared the crap outta me.”

“He keeps following me. I don’t know what he wants.”

Chuck turned his head. “Who, Dean?”

“Yes.” Castiel narrowed his eyes at his bottle, a shade of his sober solemnity showing through. “He follows me around the house as if I might lead him somewhere. He keeps offering me things. Before, when I didn’t understand him, I could play passenger in his dreams to suss out the issue from within. Now…” He winced slightly, and one hand trailed up to his chest. “When I think of it, the absence hurts,” he whispered.

Chuck didn’t know how to address the last part, so he dealt with what he knew. “You fell helping Dean - that’s sort of an incomprehensibly big favor. And he’s sort of a mother hen, so taking care of you is how he’s showing he’s grateful.”

“Grateful?”

“Yeah, man. It’s one of those human emotions. Somebody does something nice for you, and you, grateful, do a favor for them back or give them a Coke or, I guess, follow them around clucking and dressing bandages.” Castiel laughed suddenly, and Chuck shot him a curious look. “Giant Dean-chicken?”

“Yes.”

“High five for same mental image.” Chuck raised his hand, and the fallen angel slapped it dutifully.  
Chuck was having some trouble remembering why he’d initiated this exercise. Mainly he was just glad to be drunk. He'd been mostly-sober for days now, and being drunk was like coming home. He was also pretty happy with the rendition of “The Sign” they’d managed earlier, and the pleasant muffled sensation of his worries was enjoyable, but he was pretty sure neither of those were the reason for—oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, that’s right. Research.

“So, we’ve established what Dean wants,” Chuck said, raising his bottle thoughtfully. “What do you want, Cas? Really, I’m curious. What’s a recently fallen angel’s motivation?”

Castiel drowned a laugh in the mouth of the wine jug. “I have no clue.”

“Really? There’s nothing you want right now?”

“Chuck, I don’t—” Castiel swallowed, shaking his head. “I don’t know how to want properly. You humans want like you breathe. It comes so naturally to you. I’ve had only sparks of it, and for them I’ve been cast out of Paradise.”

“Maybe you need to learn it,” Chuck suggested.

“How would I learn it?”

“Close your eyes. Picture the world around you, but picture it better.” He waited while the angel followed his instruction. “Now, tell me what you changed.”

“The world is free of war and disease, and crops are plentiful worldwide.”

“More locally.”

Castiel frowned. “Dean is unworried. He and Sam are as they used to be. I never—” He opened his eyes and stared around at the dome of the panic room, huffing out a soft laugh. “I never released Sam from here. It was my fault - before I failed Dean in the green room, I failed Sam here.” His eyes, reddened from the cheap liquor and suddenly wet, rolled to meet Chuck’s. “Please don’t tell them.”

God, that expression just killed him. It almost made him want to cry himself - and not like the lines from the Buffy season two finale had made him want to cry earlier.

Chuck rested a hand on the guy’s shoulder. “Don’t worry, buddy. I won’t.”

“Thank you,” the fallen angel whispered, and his head landed on Chuck’s shoulder.

Then it was time for the cuddly-drunk portion of the program, and hey, that was a little weird, but in the grand scheme of his life, Chuck figured falling asleep with a semi-literal angel on his shoulder in a hunter’s demon-proof panic room was one of the less weird things to have happened to him.

  
***

  
Chuck didn’t tell anyone about about Castiel letting Sam out of the panic room. The Castiel in his happy-verse, however, did.

 _“It’s not so bad,” Dean said, drawing his hand down the length of the injury. The fallen angel shivered under his touch, and he patted the center of the new skin lightly. “Considering how ugly it was a week ago, I think you’re gonna be ready for swimsuit season in no time.”_

 _“You would have me display my shame in front of beachgoers?” Castiel said, furrowing his brow at the hunter._

 _Dean shook his head. “It’s not shame, Cas. I mean, it’s a damn shame they did this to you—” He felt his hackles raise at the thought of it, and his hands clenched, readying for a fight that would never come. “But this isn’t some black mark on you. You did what was right and got bitchslapped for it. This is a righteous battle scar - a sign you stood up for yourself. And for me.” He looked the guy in the eyes, tears prickling in his own. “I can’t even begin to thank you for that.”_

 _“I don’t need your thanks,” Castiel said, and Dean could’ve sworn he was blushing._

 _“What do you need?” Dean asked._

 _Castiel swallowed, looking at the kitchen floor for a long time before returning his cerulean gaze to Dean. “I’m the one who let Sam out of the panic room.”_

 _Dean sucked in his breath slightly, then shook his head. “I had my suspicions.”_

 _“I’m so sorry, Dean. It’s my fault that—”_

 _“It’s not your fault.”_

 _“I knew what my actions would lead to, and I followed my orders anyway. If I hadn’t—”_

 _“Then some other feather-brained shmuck would’ve. Cas—”_

 _“You should be hating me!” Castiel cried, tears starting down his cheeks, and for a moment he looked shocked at his own surge of emotion. “I’ve done something terrible, Dean,” he said, softer. “Why aren’t you hating me?”_

 _Dean lowered himself to the fallen angel’s eye level, bracing both his hands on the back of the man’s chair. “World’s a little more complex than that, Cas. ‘Sides, you’ve already punished yourself worse than anything I could do.” He sighed. “It’s in the past, and I’m too tired to do anything but forgive you. Now, you didn’t answer me. What do you need?”_

 _The former angel and the hunter said nothing for a moment, each looking into the other’s eyes. Then, as if some unspoken vow had occurred, Dean cradled a rough hand around Castiel’s cheek and kissed him._

Well. Um. Okay. Chuck hadn’t—well, that hadn’t been in his mental outline. But it was there, on the page, and the more he reread it, the more it made sense. He took off his reading glasses, rubbing his eyes.

Somewhere in the array of paper debris plastered by blood to the floor of his house, Chuck remembered, there was a note in a yellow legal pad that said Dean was bisexual. The fact had never made it into the books because he’d thought it was irrelevant to the plot. Well, that, and the fangirls would’ve had a collective aneurism. Chuck could hardly stand to Google his pseudonym as it was, with all the porn that came up.

So this? This sort of made sense. Dean loved to be needed, and Castiel was just learning what it meant to be human - which included being loved. Chuck had written their previous angel-charge relationship as tastefully as possible in his Gospel, but his own private notes were littered with phrases like “eye sex” and “angelic booty call,” and honestly, in the darker days when all he’d been able to see was the slow collapse of the Winchester brothers’ relationship, he’d secretly hoped that Dean would finally grab himself a piece of happiness in a coat closet with that ever-staring angel.

Chuck leaned back in his seat and did a little dance, keeping his relief quiet to avoid waking his hung-over friend on the opposite cot. Of course - romance! The book could be a romance! That would center it - give it the plot and tension it lacked. And he knew how to write romance - hell, he’d been paying the bills with romance novels since Supernatural’s publisher went bankrupt. Maybe some of his usual readers would frown on that, but hey, he'd written everything from superhero comics to bodice rippers, the genre didn't matter so long as it paid.

He stared at the page, feeling like he had control of something for the first time in weeks. So he couldn’t fight to help the big damn heroes, or stand up to the Dickfaces of the world, or really, even pull himself together long enough to take in the Very Important Conversations happening upstairs - but this? This he could do.

Chuck Shurley, former prophet of the lord and current fugitive living in a panic room, put his pen back to the page and started writing again.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chuck retreats into his newly romancified happy-verse when things get difficult. The happy-verse gets happy in the pants. Real life comes knocking, and Chuck makes a snap decision.

After the night of drunken confessions, Chuck felt that he and Castiel had come to understand each other a little better. Fully opening himself up to the fallen angel would mean revealing his potentially stay-at-Bobby’s-ending secret about his prophet days being over, so he kept that much to himself, but Castiel still looked at him every so often like they had some sort of secret club. The Club of Castiel Sprung Sam From Rehab, maybe, or the Dumb Pop Culture References Club. Either way, Chuck was grateful for it. It was the first time he’d felt like he belonged in this situation since…well. He actually couldn’t think of a time he’d felt like he belonged in this situation, before now.

Castiel tried to involve Chuck in the activities of the hunters. This usually meant circular discussions about angels and lots of stern looks passed around, and Chuck declined when he could get out of it, retreating to his writing desk instead. He could get more done there.

But other times Castiel just involved Chuck in general, regardless of what he was doing - if Bobby asked him to fetch something from the garage, he’d call Chuck up from the basement to do it together. If dishes needed cleaning, he’d ask if Chuck wanted to split the work. If he was going out to sit on the porch, he’d pass Chuck a look that said, “Interested?” and Chuck would shrug and go along.

It was beginning to annoy Dean. Chuck could tell, and he wasn’t sorry. He considered it payback for Dean shoving him against a wall that one time. Giant Dean-chicken, always clucking after Castiel, trailed along behind the two of them when these sorts of things happened, making awkward noises and occasionally trying to steer the subject toward Castiel’s well-being. You’d think he never got to spend any time alone with the angel, the amount of time he spent wearing Sam’s hand-me-down bitchface. But really, he got primary custody while Chuck still spent most of his time in the panic room. Maybe he was jealous that every night the guy he was trying to assuage his guilt about could be heard actually talking downstairs with the interloping writer.

“You two’re a couple of regular roommies,” Dean observed a few days after the drinking session. “What do you even do down there after we go to bed?”

“We stay up late swapping manly stories,” Castiel replied with his patented head tilt, and it took all of Chuck’s willpower not to burst out laughing until Dean had left the room.

Neither of them told anyone about the two waning bottles of liquor stashed in the bottom drawer of Chuck’s desk.

Chuck was beginning to feel like he’d moved into that desk. It certainly had the classic elements of his home: bottom drawer, alcohol; middle drawer, Carver Edlund’s series stacked neatly out of sight; top drawer, his current project. All it needed was action figures posed around the decades-old lamp and it could’ve been home.

More so than the desk, though, he felt like he’d made a home for himself in the story. Whenever he began to feel like an unwelcome guest at Bobby’s table or the Invisible Man in the midst of Sam and Dean’s important conversations, his mind drifted back to the happy-verse, plucking plot strings and organizing events in a neat outline. It was oddly calming, like having one of those miniature zen rock gardens to arrange. Sitting down to work on it made his shoulders slacken and the tension in his skull let up a little. He began to associate the musty attic and iron smell of the panic room with relief. In just a few days, he had a near-complete working outline of the story. By the time Sam held another angel blood drive to redo the sigil on the living room wall, Chuck had filled his entire notebook and stolen an empty canvas-bound journal from Bobby’s stash of hunting supplies to continue his work.

Romance made the story easy. Formulaic. Chuck didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of it earlier. And Castiel with Dean? That made it even easier! He didn’t even have to come up with major plot complications - they were already built into the characters. Angel falls for hunter (literally). Angel confesses feelings for hunter. Manly heteronormative hunter has to tell manly hunter family about his gay love. Angel has to face further fall from grace in the eyes of his former family. Hunter and angel struggle to reconcile the warring worlds from whence they came. It was like Romeo and Juliet, but with two guys instead of whiney teenagers and no idiot falling on a sword to lead the mess into tragedy. Also not destined for a brilliant Reduced Shakespeare Company parody, but Chuck never expected anything he wrote to be popular enough to be parodied, anyway.

  
***

  
Sam had dug too deep with the knife, and the new stitches prickled like a line of barbed wire across Castiel’s forearm. Chuck couldn’t keep his eyes off it, even though he was supposed to be watching the TV. Castiel had invited him up from his “self-induced seclusion” in the basement to watch a movie with himself and Dean, and all Chuck could think about was how that sort of knife slip-up wouldn’t have happened in his story. Pain didn’t happen for no reason in the happy-verse.

Also, in the happy-verse, he was pretty sure Bobby’s movie collection wasn’t this limited. They’d watched The Edge six times now. Six. Times. Chuck liked movies about man-eating bears just as much as the next guy, but there were only so many times you could watch the “I’m going to kill the bear!” speech before it stopped being an inspiring triumph of the human spirit and started just being Anthony Hopkins yelling about bears.

There were no man-eating bears in happy-verse, Chuck decided. Canon effective immediately.

Castiel reached for his water glass, found it empty, and pushed himself up off the couch. As soon as his feet were flat on the rug, his eyelids fluttered and his face washed pale.

“Woah, hey, Cas?” Dean said beside him.

Castiel swayed slightly, not answering, and then collapsed. Dean only barely caught him before he hit the coffee table, swearing under his breath and hauling the limp fallen angel back onto the couch. Chuck rose to help, but Dean already had the guy’s head on a pillow and his legs aligned on the battered cushions.

“C’mon, Cas,” Dean said, smacking his cheek lightly. “Show me those big spooky blues.”

The fallen angel opened his eyes slowly. “Dean…”

This was exactly the sort of interchange that could actually happen in the the romantic plotline of the happy-verse. Chuck mentally bookmarked the scene for future reference and then swallowed the rush of guilt that came with it. His friend was hurt - maybe, knowing this stupid world, secretly dying of some fallen angel brain disease. Chuck should be doting. “Is he okay?” he asked.

Dean frowned at Castiel’s arm. “Too much blood loss.”

“I’m fine,” Castiel said, his voice almost as un-fine as when he’d woken up in Chuck’s house.

“You’re not fine. Human body’s not meant to be an art supply wholesaler.”

“It’s necessary—” the fallen angel started, and Dean silenced him with a yell out into the rest of the house.

“FAMILY MEETING!”

Chuck could just about smell the cloud of book dust that followed Bobby and Sam into the room. They stood around the coffee table opposite Dean, and sitting in the worn armchair, Chuck felt like he’d suddenly apparated in a forest of scuffed jeans and flannel.

“What’s the matter?” Bobby asked.

“This,” Dean said, pointing to the angel half-conscious on the couch. “And that,” he added, aiming his finger at the sigil on the wall. “Look, I’m cool with laying low for a while, but somebody’s gotta say it: this isn’t a long-term solution. What the hell are we gonna do?”

Bobby and Sam traded uncertain looks, and Chuck pressed himself deeper into the chair.

“Well,” Sam started, “we’re up against angels, and only angels can kill other angels, so it’s a little complicated.”

“Complicated,” Dean huffed. “Even my damn laundry’s complicated these days. We’ve got an angel on our side, sort of.”

“I’m not—” Castiel started, and pursed his lips as he tried to push himself upright.

“Down, Dick Blick,” Dean ordered, pointing, and Castiel sighed, sinking back into the couch. “Okay,” he said, folding his arms and looking the other hunters in the eyes. “So we need to start coming up with a defensive plan here.”

“Against who?” Bobby said. “In case you haven’t noticed, we’re stuck between a rock and another, equally immortal rock.”

“Let’s start with the one who’s actively tried to kill us so far,” Dean said, glancing between his brother and his angel.

His angel. Chuck didn’t know why he’d started putting it that way in his head. It was kind of gay.

“We take out Zachariah,” Castiel said, the syllables harsh in his throat. The hunters nodded in somber, ponderous way that reminded Chuck of the Council of Elrond. “You have my sword,” Sam would say, stepping up to the throne/couch, and then Bobby, all gruff and dwarf-like, would announce, “And my axe!” Dean could be the Sam to Castiel’s Frodo, if they weren’t so freaking tall.

Who did that make him, Chuck wondered - Elrond? No, he was too silent for Elrond. He was probably Background Elf #3. Or maybe the pack mule.

“Okay,” Dean announced. “Inventory. What do we got that might be useful against a massive bureaucratic prick of an angel?”

“The usual ammunition,” Bobby said. “Depending on who he’s got for underlings, might be useful.”

“Blood,” Sam said, and drew back slightly at the glance he got off Bobby for being the one to suggest it. “And creativity. The angels don’t seem big on that.” He passed Castiel an apologetic shrug, but Castiel didn’t seem to be bothered by it.

“And we’ve got the prophet,” Dean said, glancing at Chuck. “Probably the most important piece in the game at this point. Whoever’s got the score ahead of time wins the game.”

Chuck frowned. He didn’t appreciate being the golden snitch in some cosmic Quidditch match. “You guys, I’m all for the good guys winning, but—”

“But his visions aren’t giving us anything useful,” Bobby said over him. “What do we do in the meantime?”

“Misdirection?” Sam suggested.

“Yeah,” Dean said, nodding. “Yeah, that’s it. We could feed misinformation through Chuck to Zach and company, trick ‘em into positioning themselves where we want ‘em.”

“Uh—” Chuck started, raising a finger.

“We could only do that once, maybe twice before they figured out what’s going on, though,” Sam said. “We’d have to make it count.”

“Excuse me—”

“Cas,” Dean said, wheeling around. “Do you still count toward that ‘only angels can kill angels’ rule, even without your wings?”

“I don’t know,” Castiel said, shaking his head. “Maybe. I’ve never heard of it being done.”

“I’ll look into it,” Bobby said.

“Hey guys—”

“So we’ve got our own firepower, anti-angel mojo, the prophet, a fallen angel on our shoulder, and our own mud monkey smarts,” Dean said, nodding proudly. “I think we’ve got the makings of a plan.”

“HEY,” Chuck shouted, leaning forward in his chair and clutching the cushion beneath him. That got their attention. He shrank turtle-style into the folded up hood of his borrowed hoodie. “What if I don’t want to?”

“Don’t want to what?” Dean said, giving him a confused look.

“Play Sydney Bristow for you,” Chuck said, and then he had to shake his head to erase the mental image of himself in a blue wig and black mesh and PVC Goth clothes. “I’m not that person. I’m—I’m just a writer.”

“This is important, son,” Bobby said, as if it needed to be said again.

“I know, but I—I can’t.” Chuck got up from his chair, keeping his eyes trained on the floor. “I just—I don’t want to. I can’t do it. You’ve got the wrong guy.”

“Are you serious?” Dean started, his voice rising so sharply Chuck wondered why it didn’t shake the windows. “You’re the best weapon we’ve got, and you’re just gonna back out because you’re having a bad self-esteem day? Listen, you—”

“Stop it,” Castiel growled, and Chuck glanced up to see the fallen angel halfway upright and gripping Dean’s wrist, his fingernails turning the skin beneath them white. He caught and held Dean’s gaze. “Don’t talk to him like that.”

If Castiel still had his grace, Chuck imagined this would be the sort of scene where the air would crackle with static, the stained glass lamp on the end table would flicker and short out, and the TV would do an impression of a snow globe. He could feel the tension physically, even without those signs - it wound something tight in his chest and made his head feel two sizes too small. Taking the opportunity to make his exit, Chuck clomped down the basement stairs and into the panic room. Closing the door after himself, he leaned against it, straining to catch his breath. Dean’s words pitched through his head, louder with every repeat. Telling them to shut up didn’t stop them. Gulping down air didn’t stop them. The only thing that helped was easing himself down onto the floor under his desk with his happy-verse manuscript.

 _It was okay,_ he wrote shakily, not caring what scene he was writing in because it was true of all of them. _It would be okay._

  
***

  
 _“It’s you, Dean,” the fallen angel said, his eyes alight with hope. In the dark of the garage, he caressed the man’s cheek and drew one of the hunter’s hands up under his own shirt, leading the broad fingertips to the edge of his injury. “It’s healing because of you.”_

 _“Me?” Dean said, brushing his lips across the man’s forehead. “I keep telling you, Cas, there’s nothing special about me.”_

 _“I rebuilt your body using my grace. That energy still lingers within you, like a coal taken from an inferno. My proximity to you has been drawing it to me, healing me.”_

 _Dean pressed his hand against the injury under Castiel’s t-shirt, feeling the way the hollow was filling in. Then he pressed their noses together and said, breath to breath with his companion, “Then let’s get you some more of that proximity.”_

 _He closed his fingers in the fabric of Castiel’s collar and pulled him in to—_

“Hey, Chuck?”

“Augh!” Chuck answered, slapping his notebook closed. He wheeled around.

Sam stood in the doorway, both eyebrows now hidden in his bangs and a hand resting cautiously on the  
panic room door. Chuck hadn’t even heard the door open. “You busy?” Sam said.

“What? No, of course not. I was just…cleaning.”

Sam glanced around the blank room. “Uh…huh. Hey, could I talk to you for a second?”

Chuck’s knuckles were turning white against the cover of his notebook. He unclenched his hand and pushed the notebook far back on the desk, putting on a smile. “Sure, Sam. What’s up?”

“Um,” Sam said, swallowing. “Somewhere else?”

“O-okay, sure,” Chuck said, and got up to follow Sam out into the basement.

They stopped in the storage area, Sam looming amidst shelves of ammunition and lawn furniture and Chuck feeling like he’d stepped into a bad Honey, We Shrunk the Kids sequel. Sam’s adam’s apple bobbed helplessly for a minute as he scanned the room, clearly searching for words, and Chuck silently prayed that this wasn’t going to be one of those heartfelt moments that ended in crying, because he was already flashing back to that scene with the rain and the mud slide, and “Died drowning in gigantic manly tears” was not something he wanted on his headstone.

“Is this about this afternoon?” he asked, pressing himself up against a shelf full of curse boxes in case that set off the waterworks.

“What?” Sam said, and shook his head. “No, no. I’m not gonna get on your case about that. I was, uh, wondering—” He cleared his throat, and the way it echoed in the small basement nook, it was like a roll of thunder. “I was wondering if you’d seen anything about me.”

“Oh,” Chuck said, his shoulders relaxing slightly.

“Because I know you said before that you weren’t having any visions of significant stuff, but I was thinking maybe you just saw something really awful going down and wanted to spare us the news. Maybe something about me.” Sam took a deep breath and stepped back, motioning to his chest. “And I wanted to let you know that, if that’s the case, I want to hear it. I really do. I think I can handle it now.”

“You…can…handle it?” Chuck drew his lower lip across his teeth, parsing the words.

“Yeah,” Sam said, and actually he seemed pretty confident. “It’s sorta something I’ve realized, being stuck here with you guys and my brother and Bobby. Remember how, back when I asked you what the story looked like for me, you said it seemed like it all rested on my shoulders?” Sam laughed and raised his arms. “Well, that’s crap. I’ve got family. I’ve got tons of shoulders!”

“Yes, a lot of shoulders,” Chuck nodded, flinching away from the display of arm span.

“Point is, I can take it. So if you’re trying to spare my feelings or something, just let me have it. I’m ready.”

Chuck looked up at him with his mouth slightly agape. Sam seemed so proud of himself, Chuck almost wanted to make something terrible up just to let him take the news gracefully. Almost. “I haven’t been,” he said, lowering his head. “I’m sorry, Sam. I haven’t seen anything about you. I wish I had.”

Sam surveyed his face for a minute, and then his shoulders drooped back to a semi-human width. “Okay,” he said, sounding a little suspicious. “Let me know when you do.” When he walked up the stairs, his footfalls sent dust raining down into the storage area.

Chuck stood in the dark by himself for a bit, trying to figure out what had just happened. Sam had lumped him and Castiel in together as “you guys.” Apparently there was some sort of idea floating around that Chuck was holding things back from everyone - and not what he was actually holding back.

Chuck knew he should be worried, but all he could think of was how he wished he could face his own future with open arms like that.

  
***

  
That night, Chuck drank the last of the liquor himself. It wasn’t like Castiel was going to, what with the missing blood and all, so hey, why not? Behind the closed door of the panic room, he got good and wasted and threw himself a ticker tape parade with pages he tore out of No Rest For The Wicked. He’d always hated that book a little bit. It had given him the meanest headaches coming out, and he didn’t even have a decent profit to show for it - instead of getting the laptop he’d been planning on, he’d followed one of his beta readers’ advice and “invested” the measly advance on the stock market just before it crashed.

When Castiel came in, this time in boxers and a Mötley Crüe t-shirt, the floor was strewn with shreds of rushed narration and Chuck was stretched out across his cot, both hands pressed hard against his eyes, watching the colors swirl behind his eyelids.

“Prophet?” Castiel asked quietly, closing the door.

Chuck sighed, peeling his hands away. The dome of the panic room swam with gray-green whorls of light. “I really wish you wouldn’t call me that.”

Castiel sat down carefully on his own cot and deposited his day clothes in the grocery crate where he kept his laundry. “I won’t, then.”

Chuck’s head lolled sideways, and he watched the horizontal image of Castiel sitting cross-legged in borrowed clothes, one hand idly resting on his chest. A stab of remorse went through his own chest in the same spot. “I’m sorry for what happened to you, Cas. If it was up to me, if I was the one doing it—”

“You weren’t.”

“I’d fix it. If I could, I’d make it better.”

“It isn’t your job to fix things.”

Chuck snuffed. “Of course not. I’m just a writer.”

“Chuck?”

“Yeah?”

Castiel waited to catch his eyes, and then he raised his eyebrows and asked, “Are you okay?”

Chuck pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes, trying to will back…something, he wasn’t sure what. When he opened his eyes, he saw the dome of the panic room and felt the weariness in the coils of muscles in his neck. If he were a character in his happy-verse, he wouldn’t have sore neck muscles. But he wasn’t a character there, and his life wasn’t a revisable universe. “No,” he said, and heard his voice come out tight. “I don’t think so, not really.”

“Anything I can do to help?”

Chuck wanted to laugh at the question - literary symmetry invading his own pulp fiction life - but his head was starting to ache already and he was pretty sure laughing was a bad idea. “I don’t think so.”

“What do you want?”

“Cas…”

“If you’re unsure, I have an educational exercise on the subject.”

Chuck smiled a little, turning his head back to his friend. “You really want to know?”

“Yes.”

He took a deep breath. “I want TV - real TV, not this five fuzzy channels crap Bobby’s got. I miss cable so much I can’t breathe sometimes when I think about all the shows my Tivo’s deleting. I want to fall asleep in my own bed and pull on my own bathrobe the next morning and not have to ‘rock-paper-scissors’ anybody for the bathroom.” He flung his arms in the air. “I want to eat something from an air-sealed bag that isn’t Funyuns! What is it with hunters and Funyuns? Funyuns and self-sacrifice, that’s all they ever want!” He shook his head. “I don’t know how you do it.”

“Do what?”

“The self-sacrificing. Dean bats his eyes at you, and you fall to give him a hand. The bunch of us need help, and in an instant you’re ready to die a slow bloodletting death just to give us a little extra time. I mean, you’d been a holy being since probably the fire and ooze stage of the world, and you were willing to throw it all away to help a handful of humans you’d known for less than a year. Who does that?” Chuck settled his arms back around his head. “You’re too good, Castiel. And they are, too, whether they believe it or not. A whole commune of heroes.”

Castiel tilted his head at Chuck, his eyes narrowing and his lips pursing. “You don’t think you’re good.”

Chuck sat up abruptly, sending the room spinning slightly, and pressed his hands to his collar bone. “Have you seen me? I don’t communicate well with other people, I’m practically a hermit, I make pop culture references constantly - I know it’s annoying—”

“It doesn’t annoy me.”

“—I forget to brush my teeth for three, four days at a time, I always take seconds even if I’m not really hungry, I steal, I lie—” Chuck was counting on his fingers. “—and I’d rather write slash fiction than deal with real life!”

Castiel blew a long breath out his nose. “What’s slash fiction?”

Chuck shook his head. “Ask Sam to explain it to you sometime.”

The fallen angel nodded, then returned his attention to the matter. “Chuck, you’re not a bad person.”

“You really need to ask Sam about slash fiction before you make that call,” Chuck said, biting his thumbnail.

“You dressed my wound,” Castiel said. “You dragged me into your car to get me to safety, bought me clothes, introduced me to so many new things to try to help me.”

“I also introduced you to Ace of Base,” Chuck said quietly. “For which I am _so_ sorry.”

“Don’t be. That sing-along was excellent.”

“It was, wasn’t it?” Chuck frowned deeply.

Castiel smiled. “You’re a good man, Chuck. And a good friend. I promise you I’m right - I’ve had a lot of experience recently picking out the good men from the bad.”

Chuck didn’t feel the words connect to anything inside him, but he smiled anyway, for Castiel. “Thanks for sticking up for me today.”

“No need for thanks,” The angel replied. “You would’ve done the same for me.”

That did register. It was true - he would’ve. “That’s right,” he said. “‘Cause I’ve got your back.”

“Good night, Chuck,” Castiel said, burying his face in the pillow.

“G’night, Mr. Stark,” Chuck mumbled.

He sat in his cot for awhile after Castiel went to sleep, thinking about how Sam had lumped him and Castiel together as “you guys” and the heroes upstairs and across the room from him, and briefly ruminating on how much he despised Funyuns. The liquor was starting to wear off - he could tell because he was starting to feel a little bit of remorse for the book he’d ruined. He turned his thoughts to his happy-verse and the mostly-finished outline in his head.

It needed something. He knew this. Every story needed a proper climax, even ones that nobody would read. In a regular romance, it would’ve been easy - the romantic leads getting together - but he’d already brought Castiel and Dean together a third of the way into the book. They’d had their angst moments and pushed through them. Hell, the last scene he’d written was the two of them having the big “Is this a relationship?” talk, and while fully warm fuzzy-inducing, it wasn’t exactly building action. So unless he wanted to leave that the lackluster peak of the story, he’d have to find—

Oh. Ohhhhh crap.

Chuck’s gut jerked as the realization struck, and he covered his face with his hands, pushing his fingertips up into his messy hair. “Aw, Christ,” he muttered.

He knew what his story needed. With the tensions he’d been setting up between characters, the way the weight of the conflict had settled - really, when he thought about it, there was only one way for his happy-verse story to end.

Castiel and Dean had to get it on.

  
***

  
All the next day, Chuck wrote. And scratched out. And wrote again. He started the scene so many times he was beginning to think he’d been thrown into a trickster time loop of softcore gay porn. Around mid-afternoon, while everyone else was upstairs strategizing, Chuck finally decided to scrap everything he had in mind and just start in media res, drawing scene elements from a tiny envelope in his head like cards in Clue: Dean on Castiel, in the back of the VW van in the scrap yard, with a blowjob. GO.

 _Castiel gazed at Dean with a look of dire longing. “For most of my existence, ‘want’ has been an abstract concept, something to feel only by proxy while closely observing a human. Even before they took my grace, you made wanting a tangible thing to me. I wanted to be near you before I knew to identify the urge.”_

 _“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Dean said, kissing him deeply. His hands explored the hem of Castiel’s borrowed shirt, straying into the lines of soft skin and taut muscles beneath it. “Don’t tell anyone,” he breathed into the angel’s neck, nipping at it, “but I got half a hard-on when you threatened my life in Bobby’s kitchen.”_

 _“Dean,” Castiel groaned low in his throat, pressing hard against him._

Okay, so this? This was awkward. Like really, really awkward.

Chuck had written sex scenes before - hell, he’d published them under a pseudonym and proudly cashed the check! He’d even taken a two-week email correspondence course on Writing The Love Scene before his foray into romance novels - but that was before he’d known his characters personally.

 _Dean lowered his head to the angel’s smooth chest, tasting the soft flesh where his collar bones met. He tasted like anyone, the hunter was a little surprised to discover - no special flavor that indicated the power this body had held, no crackle of electricity. Dean worked his way downward slowly, and as his lips brushed the top edge of Castiel’s injury, the angel’s muscles stiffened._

 _“Dean,” he said, high in his throat._

Chuck paused, cursing his repetition. “Dean” again? Half of this Castiel’s dialogue was “Dean.” It was like happy-verse Castiel was so lost for angst and exposition that he filled the void with his favorite syllable. Chuck sighed. It wasn’t like anyone was going to read it, anyway. And like Anne Lamott advised, everything was just a shitty first draft before revision.

 _There was still an edge of bandage in the way - a mostly pointless square of gauze and medical tape that only served to cover the new skin beneath. The hole from which Castiel’s grace had been torn was nearly invisible now - a slight divot in his chest and nothing more. Dean peeled away the bandage with his broad, nimble fingers, enjoying the fact that his love had helped to heal it. “God,” he breathed huskily, drawing his fingers down across the scar, “this is amazing.”_

 _“It’s—” the angel started, and pressed his lips together hard. “It’s a mark of sin.”_

 _Dean only grinned up at him. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m a fan of sin.” And then he kissed and teased a trail down the front of the angel, his lips raking across the new skin just like any other part. It was slick and pink, but only skin. And like the rest of the angel, it ripped small unintelligible noises from him when touched._

Symbolism. He had to push on the symbolism, otherwise this was just gratuitous.

 _“Does it hurt?” Dean asked, drawing his lips away from the scar to gaze up into Castiel’s waiting eyes._

 _“Not with you,” the man replied, beginning to smile._

Bingo! Symbolism achieved. Chuck shifted in his chair, eyeing the panic room door.

 _Dean undid Castiel’s jeans and slipped them down along his slender hips, his fingers brushing against the soft flesh there. Castiel’s proud manhood—_

No.

 _Castiel’s quivering member—_

Yeah, no.

 _Castiel’s vulnerable man-reaction—_

Um, definitely not.

Chuck scowled at the page, crossing out phrase after phrase until he finally gave up and settled on the most scene-appropriate one. Then he decided he’d spent entirely too much time thinking about fallen angel penis names and moved on.

 _Dean’s mouth closed around him, drawing louder and louder sounds of ecstacy from his once-holy lips. The song of Castiel’s pleasure filled the back of the van, and Dean worried momentarily that maybe his brother or father figure might overhear, having ventured out into the scrap yard to look for them. But then Castiel moaned his name and he decided he didn’t care if the world and all of Heaven and Hell knew. Dragging his fingers down the length of Castiel’s body as he worked, he felt the muscles tense and sweat begin to trail down his sides like rain on the window of the Impala._

 _Fingers dug into his hair, and he felt the taut body beneath his own, newly mortal and aching for a glimpse of true human passion, begin to—_

“Chuck?”

“AUGH!” Chuck replied, turning around and covering his notebook with one arm in the same motion.

Castiel stood in the doorway, giving him the curious look he normally reserved for when Chuck accidentally referenced Sex and the City. “It’s time for dinner.”

“Right. Coming.” Chuck blinked hard, cursing himself internally. “I’m coming—to dinner. Yes. That.”

He slipped the notebook into the top drawer casually and joined Castiel at the stairs.

“Are you all right?” Castiel asked him cautiously.

“I’m totally normal and great, thanks for asking. How’s your day been, buddy?”

That seemed to change the topic.

The truth was, Chuck was not totally normal and great. At the dinner table, he couldn’t stop noticing stupid little subtextual things that were probably not actually subtext between Dean and Castiel. Like when Castiel nicked his finger on the steak knife and Dean immediately reached to wrap the injured digit in a napkin, or when Castiel stared “eye sex” style at Dean while he was talking. And he couldn’t stop thinking about the two of them in the scene he’d just written, stripped down and tasting each other. It was just—jarring was probably the word. He’d never written a sex scene where he had to have dinner with its subjects afterwards. He’d actually…never written a sex scene between two guys before. Which made it slightly more awkward and difficult to stop thinking about.

So much so that ten minutes into the meal, he accidentally asked Dean, “Could you pass the penis?” When everyone’s attention landed on him, he amended, “Peas. Pass the peas.” That didn’t much change the situation, except for getting a bowl of peas tossed in front of him, so he made a show of smacking his forehead and said, “Sorry, I was thinking about this article I read this afternoon about duck penises.” And then he proceeded to inform the table’s occupants for the next five minutes about how ducks were one of few bird species that actually had penises, that they actually had the second largest penis to body size ratio of all animals, they used their giant corkscrew-shaped penises to sword fight other duck’s penises sometimes to get to female ducks, and hey, wasn’t that actually kind of fascinating?

Bobby left the table after just a few sentences, clearly losing all faith in humanity. Castiel listened raptly, Sam with a slightly baffled but nonetheless entertained expression. And Dean, when Chuck was done, screwed up his eyebrows and said simply, “Duck penises?”

“National Geographic, Dean,” Chuck said, putting on his most pretentious writer tone. “You should check it out sometime. You might learn something.”

  
***

  
The novel - and it was a novel now, he’d decided, a little short and disorganized but totally fixable in revision - was nearly complete. Chuck huddled over his desk, drawing out the denouement as much as he could. First they’d had sex in the van. And the garage. And Bobby’s guest bedroom. Now, it was time to drop the smut for a bit and get back to the plot.

 _Castiel clutched the towel to his waist as he ran, still dripping from the interrupted shower, his feet pounding out a thunderstorm on the porch boards._

 _Bobby careened out the door after him, a shotgun in his fist and his voice raised in a bellow. “Get back here! I know you angel-whammied him, you sneaky bastard!”_

 _“I didn’t do anything to him!”_

 _“You did plenty to me!” Dean yelled from the doorway, clearly enjoying the show._

 _“You’re not helping!”_

 _Bobby stopped on the edge of the steps and took aim. His shot nicked the ground at Castiel’s feet, and the fallen angel managed to dance with a yelp and shoot Dean a glare at once. “Where d’you think you’re runnin’?” Bobby hollered. “There’s only so much yard, and you don’t have your wings! Just get back here and take the whammy off the boy so I can kill you proper!”_

 _“Bobby, cool it,” Dean said, stepping out to set a hand on the man’s shoulder. His other hand held a hand towel to his crotch. “There’s no whammy. Look, I’m sorry you had to find out like that—” His smirk said otherwise “—but me and Cas, we’ve kind of got a thing going on.”_

 _Castiel stopped to catch his breath, leaning against a fence post. “Would it help if I told you I love him?”_

 _Bobby made an indistinguishable sound in his throat, looking between the man and the angel. “Marginally,” he answered, cradling the shotgun against —_

The lamp on Chuck’s writing desk began to shake. He paused, sitting back as he felt the vibrations moving through his chair. A moment later, the iron walls of the panic room began to groan, and all the furniture took a plunge to the left.

Chuck didn’t even have time to yell as he hurtled to the ground. Everything free standing in the room lurched and jumped, and outside he heard a cacophony that could only be boxes of ammunition and amulets raining to the cement floor.

An earthquake? In South Dakota? He decided to take a dive under the bed instead of puzzling it out. It was the end times, after all. Behind him, he heard his notebook slap to the floor.

The rumbling and groaning pierced Chuck’s ears like a screech, and he pressed his hands against his head to drown it out. So he felt but didn’t hear it when the earthquake stopped. He peeled one hand away from his ear hesitantly, then finding only a faint clatter of things moving upstairs, removed his other hand and crawled out from under the bed.

The basement stairs were intact, though the railing had cracked in two places. Chuck ventured upstairs, calling, “Guys? Everybody all right?”

A cough and a barrage of swearing replied. Bobby, at least, was okay.

Chuck padded through the house, making his way across the debris field. He found Sam in the kitchen, clutching a bowl of cookie dough he’d been mixing with a carton of eggs rained down his front, and Dean by the front door, beneath a bookcase that had made an A shape against the wall. Both of them were fine.

“Castiel?” Chuck called, and behind him, rolling his bruised shoulder, Dean called, “Cas?”

Castiel didn’t answer. He was occupied in the living room, standing in the center of the mess with his eyes fixed on the window beside the sigil. A crack split the anti-angel sigil through the center, so clean it looked intentional.

Outside the window, about thirty feet from the house, a trio of figures in suits stood in the driveway.

“Ninety-eight, ninety-nine, a hundred!” called Zachariah’s nasal voice, and he raised his hands toward the house. “Oh, will you look at that? Found you already! You really should work on your hiding.”

Chuck’s center went cold. He reached out for Castiel’s arm, but Castiel didn’t respond. He did, however, start out the door, his eyes fixed on the spot where Zachariah and his angel posse stood. They were burly angels, a woman and a man, both in dark suits, and as he walked behind Castiel, Chuck found himself thinking of them as stunt angels.

No one said anything. They just followed, blankly, because—well, Chuck preferred to think it was because the two wussiest members of the group were striding out to meet the enemy and the hunters didn’t want to compromise their manhood by staying behind, but in truth it was probably because there was nothing else to do. Castiel, their only guard against the angels, was already down the porch steps. Dean followed shortly behind, with Chuck, and Sam and Bobby brought up the rear, Bobby gripping the cuff of Sam’s shirt like the boy might disappear if he didn’t.

Zachariah clapped his hands together as the entire Winchester company walked out into the driveway after Castiel. “Is it my turn to hide now?” he sneered.

“You’ll wish you had,” Castiel growled.

And hey, great, bravado! Chuck’s stomach shriveled within him. He took a step forward so he was shoulder to shoulder with Castiel. The fallen angel glanced over at him and straightened up.

“Yeah,” Chuck spat at Zachariah, trying to add a note of solidarity.

Zachariah tilted his head and pouted his lips. “Aw. That’s just precious.”

“What do you want?” Dean asked, coming up on Castiel’s other side.

“So many things,” Zachariah said, sounding wistful. “World peace. The end of disease. A fashionable bracelet made from Castiel’s shiny human teeth. Oh,” he added, looking straight at Chuck, “and the prophet, if you don’t mind.”

“Sorry,” Castiel said, the edge of his lip rising dangerously, “we’re not selling teeth or prophets today. Check the flea market two towns over.”

Dammit, Dean looked downright proud of him. Chuck smiled, then looked forward and saw Zachariah staring at him again with those creepy eyes. It was like if the Cheshire Cat dressed up as a shady salesman for Halloween, and somehow the thought made Chuck even more terrified.

Zachariah chuckled. “Shame about your face,” he said to Castiel.

Don’t take the bait, Chuck thought. Don’t do it. Please don’t.

“What about my face?” Castiel said.

Aw, crap. Crap crap crap crap.

Zachariah dropped his voice slightly and reached behind him, where in a blink, Stunt Angel #2 provided him a long, gleaming sword. “It’s going to get so filthy lying in the dirt.”

Chuck saw it coming. He’d written moments like this with these characters so many times that he could probably predict the very second of a gunshot with his eyes closed. He saw the arc of Zachariah’s arm starting toward Castiel, and the momentary widening of his companion’s eyes as he realized what was happening and that he couldn’t just fly out of the path.

For an instant, Chuck saw his own life with the kind of critical clarity he usually reserved for revisions. He saw his archangel-demolished house in a city he’d never had much use for, his cupboards filled with only alcohol and bread, his career papered with pseudonyms. He saw his one box of significant achievements stuffed unceremoniously into a desk drawer in Bobby’s panic room. The only important thing he’d ever written, and it didn’t even have his name on it. Hell, it wasn’t even his - it belonged to whatever power handed out the visions. He saw his happy-verse, too - just one more in a long line of attempts to make something right in this stupid, cruel, denouement-less world. It wasn’t a fair world - Castiel had been absolutely right on that point. Castiel, his friend, who’d called him a good man.

He wanted Castiel to be right about that, too.

Chuck shoved himself sideways, knocking Castiel to the ground. As Zachariah’s sword tore into his chest, the ground began to shake once again, a blinding light roaring across the scrapyard.

Chuck didn’t feel the pain until he hit the ground, and even then it was only a hot prickle beneath the well of blood spreading across the front of him. When his head rolled to the side, his cheek stuck in a pool of it. Castiel, both hands pressed to the dirt, stared back at him.

Someone yelled.

The archangel’s light washed the scrapyard white, forcing everyone - including Castiel - to cover their ears. For once, Chuck didn’t. He heard Zachariah scream, a sound shriller than Castiel’s scream in his living room, and knew the archangel was ripping the holy hell out of him.

Chuck’s second to last thought was: He killed me with a sword. How weird is that?

His last thought was that Castiel would have appreciated the reference.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A sort of Epilogue.

It was 11:30 on a Tuesday morning. The laptop screen said so, in big white screensaver letters.

Chuck blinked. His eyelids made a slow sticky noise. He turned his head, and the rest of the room wavered into focus.

A can of Coke on the bedside table, beside the laptop.

The remains of a ticker tape parade still collected around the feet of the cot across the room.

A pair of knit slippers attached to a pair of legs in jeans, attached to the top half of Castiel on the cot. Sam beside him, pointing and saying something quietly about the book spread out in his lap.

Chuck’s morning mouth suddenly hit him, and he rolled toward the edge of the cot, cringing and making a “Blegh” sound in the back of his mouth.

The two men looked up, Sam cutting himself off mid-sentence to move to Chuck’s side. He lowered himself to his knees beside the cot and steadied Chuck’s shoulder before he could fall off the edge. “Hey,” he said, his smile broad. “Morning, Chuck. How’re you feeling?”

“Like I ate a leftover ass sandwich,” Chuck said, pushing himself upright. Sam kept his gigantic hands on Chuck’s shoulders, shooting him the Brow Ridge Of Moderate Concern, and Chuck was just beginning to wonder what the hell was this guy’s problem and what he of all people was doing reading in the panic room when he remembered.

The sword. The archangel.

“I—I died,” Chuck said, suddenly fully awake. His eyes did a circuit of the panic room and landed back on Castiel, who was standing at the other cot. “Tell me this isn’t Heaven. If Heaven is Bobby’s panic room, that’s like a Matrix: Reloaded level letdown. Hey, let go of me!” he added to Sam, who was still leaning in too close and apparently giving him some sort of visual inspection. Sam removed his hands and stood up, still focusing on him more than was probably healthy.

“It’s not Heaven,” Castiel said, smiling, and shrugged. “It’s just Bobby’s panic room.”

“Bobby’s panic room in Limbo?” Chuck guessed, and watched the fallen angel shake his head. He swallowed, shrinking slightly. “Bobby’s panic room in Hell?”

“Just Bobby’s panic room,” Castiel repeated.

“I think you’re failing to grasp the whole ‘I died’ thing.”

“Does this really look like Hell to you?” Sam asked, giving him a look like maybe he’d clonked his head on something.

“It tastes like Hell,” Chuck said, smacking his lips, and paused. He tested the texture of the sheets with his fingers and brought one foot down to feel out the slick surface of the floor. The place smelled like old books and iron. It felt like—it couldn’t be— He reached a hand behind him and pulled a mostly empty bottle of whiskey out from the gap between the cot and the wall.

It was.

Chuck patted down his chest in search of gashes. “But I—I died! I know I did - I was there!”

“Yeah, welcome to the club,” Sam said, shrugging.

Before he could ask another question, Castiel said, “The archangel.” He smirked. “They can rebuild you. They have the technology. They can make you better, stronger, faster…”

Sam shook his head. “You nerds enjoy yourselves - I’m gonna go let Dean and Bobby know he’s up.”

Chuck sat back against the wall as Sam left, feeling like the logic of the universe had been knocked clear out of it. When he trailed a hand up under his shirt - or rather, one of Sam’s Stanford t-shirts - he didn’t feel so much as a line of scar tissue where the sword had hit.

Dickface. He remembered Zachariah warning him about something like this, months ago. “We’ll only bring you back to life,” he murmured.

“You’re an asset,” Castiel said. “Heaven won’t let you die, whether you’re on their side or not.”

“Good to know.” Chuck examined his hands, then did a quick visual once-over of his head, feet, and the contents of his pajama pants. As he confirmed that everything was in place, a weight descended on him. “I died.” He sat back against the wall with a whump. “Holy crap, what a day.”

“More like a week,” Castiel said, stepping closer.“You were out for a long time.”

“And Sam - Sam was in here, without having a panic reaction?”

“He had to be. He took it upon himself to play nurse.”

Chuck’s imagination immediately leapt in to prove it hadn’t atrophied, painting Sam in a gigantic set of fantasy nurse scrubs. He blinked hard, trying to force out the image, and settled his attention on Castiel instead.

Castiel had a couple days’ scruff of beard collected and wore a rumpled shirt that looked like it may have been slept in. His hands were bunched in front of him like he didn’t quite know what to do with them, and when he eased himself down onto the cot to sit next to Chuck, it was with a slow, deliberate motion like he was debating his sitting options. Chuck imagined it as a multiple choice quiz. Option A: hands in lap; option B: sit on hands; option C: hands between knees; option D: all of the above, on a rotating basis. Castiel seemed to be leaning toward D.

“So, where’s the gleaming robes and the wash of white light?” Chuck glanced around the panic room. “Feels like coming back from the dead oughtta have more pomp and circumstance.”

“That’s what everyone says. You should’ve heard Lazarus complain.”

Chuck looked over at Castiel. The guy’s face was set hard, and his lips made a sharp line across his face, like they were trapping something inside - or maybe swallowed a bug. “How’re you doing?”

Castiel furrowed his brow, not looking at him. “I got you a Coke,” he said quietly. “And I thought you might like to stream some TV shows on Sam’s laptop when you woke up.”

“A Coke?” Chuck repeated.

“You gave your life for me.” Castiel’s eyes widened as they turned on him, and he realized they were wet. “I’m trying to be grateful, but these gifts seem insufficient.”

Chuck grabbed the Coke can and turned it over in his hands. It was lukewarm, left out for too long, and the side was dented. He smiled. “No, Cas, it’s perfect.”

Castiel stared at him like he had absolutely no idea what to do next. He took a shaky breath, and tears started down his cheeks. Chuck, half laughing and half choking up himself, hugged him.

Castiel pressed his face into Chuck’s collar and held onto him tightly, his shoulders shaking and a small, startled noise slipping out of him. So the real Castiel could surprise himself with emotion just like his happy-verse counterpart. Chuck smiled. “Hey, it’s okay,” he said, patting his friend’s back. “It’s okay.”

And in an uninformed, just back from the dead sort of way, he felt like that was true.

  
***

  
There were new sigils on the walls and doors - wards that Bobby and Sam had dug up in the wake of the archangel to protect the place. Dean had a whole wall of the kitchen reserved for game plan notes for the apocalypse, and much of the furniture still lay cracked or broken from the earthquake. If it hadn’t looked like crazy people lived there before, it did now.

Chuck got a pat on the shoulder from Sam when he showed up for lunch, and a one-armed muttering hug from Dean. He hadn’t expected to ever get a hug from Dean, especially after their silent custody battle over Castiel, but the one that really surprised him was Bobby.

Bobby, who had made a hobby of avoiding him, saw him wandering into the kitchen and wiped the barbecue sauce off his hands specifically to shake Chuck’s hand. It wasn’t a warm handshake by any means, but it was a handshake from Bobby, and it lasted a good five seconds, ending with a slap on the shoulder. Chuck figured, knowing Bobby, that meant he was practically family now.

Lunch was a business affair. They talked shop about the apocalypse between bites. Chuck was surprised at how little it bothered him. When he sat back and listened, he could see past the stressful doom and destruction phrases and into the heart of the matter. Sam, Dean, Bobby, and Castiel were looking to fix the world. He could get behind that. Maybe he could even help.

After all, he’d played the self-sacrifice game now and come out unscathed on the other side. He’d saved a life - intentionally, even! As much as he wanted to object to the idea, every rational and referential molecule in his brain said that sacrificing yourself for somebody generally fell into the “heroic deeds” category. Being welcomed in on the world-saving conversation over hot wings added more weight to the idea.

Chuck Shurley: Prophet. Writer. Hero.

Well, not so much with that first part, but it’d still look great on business cards.

  
***

  
The night after he came back from the dead, Chuck made himself a plate of fries in the toaster oven underneath Dean’s Wall of Exposition and snuck them downstairs to eat while he finished writing his happy-verse. The room was his for the evening - Sam had stopped hovering around him waiting to save him from spontaneous combustion or whatever ailments a recently un-deceased person might suffer, and Castiel had taken a walk with Dean.

Writing the happy-verse felt good. The knots remaining inside Chuck loosened as he tied up the ending. There was the Keeping Castiel’s Secrets knot, which went as soon as Bobby came to terms with Castiel and Dean’s budding relationship, and the Not Really A Prophet Anymore knot, which was eased by the shmoopy kiss on the last page. The happy-verse couldn’t really do much for the Holy Crap I Died knot, but he expected that one would work itself out in time. He penned the last line, wrote “The End” at the bottom of the page, and stared at the notebooks, feeling like something was still missing.

A throat cleared behind him. Chuck jumped, glancing up.

Dean stood in the middle of the room, crossing his arms. “Getting some good writing time in?”

“Yeah,” Chuck said, frowning as he bit into a handful of fries. Something wasn’t right here, and when Dean spoke again he knew why instantly.

“So, you’ve been writing angel porn, huh, Chuck?”

Chuck nearly choked. “I—” he started. “You—but—porn?” Swallowing a hard lump of fry, he tried to compose himself. “I mean, what? Angel porn? Pfft, I don’t write angel porn. That’d be…weird. And blaspheming. And weird.”

Dean cracked a smirk. “You mean to tell me that somebody else broke into Bobby’s to write about ‘Castiel’s sinful endowment’ in your handwriting?”

Chuck couldn’t be sure what shade of pink he turned, but Crayola would probably give it a name like “Pomegranate Sunset.” Okay, time to make a retreat. He got up from his chair. “You’re not—you’re not supposed to read that! Nobody’s supposed to read that! I wouldn’t even let my beta reader read that - assuming he hasn’t been smited in the whole heavenly war thing, I guess.” He backed toward the doorway, raising a finger. “Is smited the right past tense? How do you even say that? Y’know, maybe I should go find a dictionary—”

“It’s smote,” Castiel said over his shoulder, making him jump. “And there is nothing inherently sinful about my ‘endowment.’”

“Aw, god,” Chuck muttered, curling his hands up to his head. “I’m gonna get smote. I knew it! Even before I met you guys, I just had a feeling I’d die by some kind of smiting!”

“Nobody’s gonna get smote,” Dean said, and frowned as if re-evaluating the wording. “Anyway, you were sorta dead, and we wanted to know what you’d seen coming next. Don’t worry,” he added when Chuck groaned, “Sam and Bobby haven’t read it. Just us.”

“A fascinating text,” Castiel noted, leaning against the door of the panic room.

“It’s not prophecies, though,” Chuck said, shrugging against the wall. “I mean, I—I haven’t gotten a vision since before Lucifer. It’s basically just fan fiction, fueled by panic and sleep deprivation.”

Dean and Castiel exchanged what could only be described as soulful looks.

“Some of it is indeed apocrypha,” Castiel said, trailing his eyes over to Chuck.

“Not to mention really, really weird,” Dean added, shaking his head. “Especially the focus of the story.”

“Not for the written word of the Lord,” Castiel replied, tipping his head toward the hunter. “Even across cultures, religious texts tend to concentrate on the relationship between man and the divine - in any incarnation that relationship takes. The Olympians and their human lovers, for example. Even the angels threatened with physical knowledge at Sodom and Gamorrah—”

“Dude, you know I don’t speak Bible.”

“It’s a well-known story, Dean. The cities were rife with sin, so the Lord sent down two angels—”

“Hold on a second,” Chuck said, his head spinning a little. “Are you two actually—I mean—” He rested his palms on the sides of his forehead, looking between the two men. “Wait, was I—was I right?”

“As I said,” Castiel intoned seriously, “it is not all apocrypha.”

“But if you print that in your gospel and my brother reads it,” Dean said, “I’ll kill you six ways from Sunday.”

Chuck groped for a chair. “I need to sit down.”

“Completely true or not, I still admire your work,” Castiel said. “The Winchesters hugging and sharing their feelings was my favorite fictional touch.”

“So,” Chuck said, “you’re saying all this time, I’ve still been having visions - just mixing them in with the fake stuff?”

“Essentially,” the angel answered.

“But how? I haven’t been getting the headaches that always came with my visions! I haven’t been passing out and waking up with images in my head!”

“Your process is evolving,” Castiel said. “It happens. The holy word becomes integrated with your waking mind once you accept your role for what it is. You are no longer Carver Edlund; you are the prophet Chuck. The moment you offered me a hand in the face of the archangel, you accepted this as your destiny.”

It hit Chuck, and he grimaced. “So, you mean, I’ve been writing people I know actually—with the—in the—”

“Throes of fiery sacreligious passion?” Dean offered, smirking. “Yeah, sorry, dude.”

For a brief moment, Chuck considered the idea that maybe he was in Hell after all, and this was just a special kind of Hell where the driving force of punishment was social awkwardness and the willies.

Then he saw Castiel’s face. The guy was blushing slightly and holding back a grin, looking for all the world like a schoolboy with his first crush. And y’know, it was like thirty-one flavors of weird, but anything that made Castiel smile like that couldn’t be a bad thing - not entirely.

Chuck propped an arm up on the back of his chair and dropped his chin onto his hand. “So, I’m never gonna get out of this prophet thing, am I?”

“No,” Castiel said. “But it does have its benefits.”

“Free mental porn of my friends?” Chuck said miserably.

“Magician-like resurrection abilities,” Dean said. “And an archangel ready to kick ass blindly to defend your honor, when it’s not busy trying to take down your friends.”

“Also, your visions ought to make for entertaining party tricks,” Castiel added.

Chuck drew a hand down his face. “I think I’m gonna need a lot more booze.”

“So, uh,” Dean started, looming slightly over the writing desk, “how’s this story end?”

“You really wanna know?”

“Well, I’m a little concerned Bobby might shoot one of us.”

Chuck sighed, flipping his notebook open to the proper page. “All right,” he said, handing it over to the hunter, “take a look.”

  
***

  
“Does your novel have a name?” Castiel asked.

They were sitting on the hood of the Impala, gazing down the driveway. In the deep distance, across the South Dakota plains, a patch of clouds were illuminated red - fire, probably apocalypse-related. Sam and Bobby were researching it now. Dean was probably flattening his face against the living room window having an aneurism because somebody’s butts besides his and Sam’s were pressing into his car. But Chuck didn’t care. He’d written Sam and Dean’s bi-weekly beer and exposition sessions countless times and had always wanted to try it himself.

Chuck leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “I was sorta thinking ‘A Perfect World.’”

Castiel snorted, raising his PBR to his lips. “Fitting.”

“Revision’s gonna be a bitch. Especially knowing what actually happened.” Chuck took a swig, thought about it again, then took another swig to help the first one go down. “I’m gonna have to get rid of the hugging and pie.”

“Promise me something,” Castiel said.

“What?”

“Promise me you’ll write yourself into the story this time.” Castiel gave him the sort of look he usually reserved for imparting direly important information. Combined with the AC/DC t-shirt and the PBR, it was almost comical. “Your role is vital to the course of these events. Like it or not, Chuck, this is your story now, too.”

Yeah, he was beginning to get that. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll give myself a cameo.”

“Main cast.”

“Recurring guest star.”

“Deal.” Castiel looked out across the landscape serenely. “So, what now?”

“Well, I was thinking,” Chuck said, giving his beer a considering look, “maybe we could kill some evil sons of bitches and raise a little hell?”

“Sounds good to me,” Castiel said, raising his PBR.

The prophet and the fallen angel clinked their bottles together and drank.


End file.
